My colleagues Thom Hickey and Jenny Toves published a blog post "Matching
Names to VIAF" that some on this list might find interesting:

http://outgoing.typepad.com/outgoing/2015/09/matching-names-to-viaf.html

Anyone attempting to disambiguate names may find their algorithm (and
scoring mechanism) useful.

I also want to point out that such work provides significant improvements
to our linked data work -- work that we are uniquely positioned in the
library world to perform due to the huge WorldCat aggregation. This also
benefits our member libraries, who then get richer and more useful records
from us.
Roy