Thanks for the prompt Ed, 

We've had a stupid simple vocabulary app for a few years now which we use
to manage all of our controlled vocabularies [1].  These are represented in our
metadata editing application as drop-downs and type ahead values as described
in the first email in this thread.  Nothing too exciting.  The entire vocabulary app 
is available to our systems as xml, python or json objects. When we export our 
records as RDF we try and use the links for these values instead of the strings. 

We are currently working on another simple app to manage names for our system
(UNT Name App). It takes into account some of the use cases described in this thread such as 
disambiguation, variant names, and the all important linking to other vocabularies 
of which VIAF, LC, and Wikipedia are the primary expected targets. Once populated
it is to be integrated into the metadata editing system to provide auto-complete
functions to the various name fields in our repository. 

As far as technology we've tried to crib off the Chronicling America site as much
as possible and follow the pattern of using the suggestions extension of OpenSearch [2]
to provide the API. 

Mark



[1] http://digital2.library.unt.edu/vocabularies/
[2] http://www.opensearch.org/Specifications/OpenSearch/Extensions/Suggestions/1.1



________________________________________
From: Code for Libraries [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Ed Summers [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2013 2:15 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Adding authority control to IR's that don't have it built in

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 5:19 PM, Kyle Banerjee <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> This would certainly be a possibility for other projects, but the use case
> we're immediately concerned with requires an authority file that's
> maintained by our local archives. It contains all kinds of information
> about people (degrees, nicknames, etc) as well as terminology which is not
> technically kosher but which we know people use.

Just as an aside really, I think there's a real opportunity for
libraries and archives to make their local thesauri and name indexes
available for integration into other applications both inside and
outside their institutional walls. Wikipedia, Freebase, VIAF are
great, but their notability guidelines don't always the greatest match
for cultural heritage organizations. So seriously consider putting a
little web app around the information you have, using it for
maintaining the data, making it available programatically (API), and
linking it out to other databases (VIAF, etc) as needed.

A briefer/pithier way of saying this is to quote Mark Matienzo [1]

  Sooner or later, everyone needs a vocabulary management app.

:-)

//Ed

PS. I think Mark Phillips has done some interesting work in this area
at UNT. But I don't have anything to point you at, maybe Mark is tuned
in, and can chime in.

[1] https://twitter.com/anarchivist/status/269654403701682176