Integrating Access to Authority Data for Improved Interoperability of Research Data in the Digital Humanities

Abstract

Authority data is used to unambiguously identify persons, organisations and places. In this paper, a means to integrate access to several providers of authority data into data curation processes is described, which facilitates disambiguation of geographic data. Combined access to general datasets, in our case the Gemeinsame Normdatei (GND), as well as highly specialized datasets, here the Memorial Archives, improves the resolution of ambiguities and particularly benefits use cases of the Digital Humanities. The integration is necessary in order to abstract from technical, syntactical and semantic heterogeneity of the providers. Operations such as querying geographic information and receiving enriched data from different data sources are facilitated. An overview of the goals of the system, related projects and authority data providers are presented, as well as details on the implementation and further steps.