From Records to a Web of Library Data – Pt2 Hubs of Authority by Richard Wallis.
From the post:
Hubs of Authority
Libraries, probably because of their natural inclination towards cooperation, were ahead of the game in data sharing for many years. The moment computing technology became practical, in the late sixties, cooperative cataloguing initiatives started all over the world either in national libraries or cooperative organisations. Two from personal experience come to mind, BLCMP started in Birmingham, UK in 1969 eventually evolved in to the leading Semantic Web organisation Talis, and in 1967 Dublin, Ohio saw the creation of OCLC. Both in their own way having had significant impact on the worlds of libraries, metadata, and the web (and me!).
One of the obvious impacts of inter-library cooperation over the years has been the authorities, those sources of authoritative names for key elements of bibliographic records. A large number of national libraries have such lists of agreed formats for author and organisational names. The Library of Congress has in addition to its name authorities, subjects, classifications, languages, countries etc. Another obvious success in this area is VIAF, the Virtual International Authority File, which currently aggregates over thirty authority files from all over the world – well used and recognised in library land, and increasingly across the web in general as a source of identifiers for people & organisations.
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These, Linked Data enabled, sources of information are developing importance in their own right, as a natural place to link to, when asserting the thing, person, or concept you are identifying in your data. As Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s fourth principle of Linked Data tells us to “Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things”. VIAF in particular is becoming such a trusted, authoritative, source of URIs that there is now a VIAFbot responsible for interconnecting Wikipedia and VIAF to surface hundreds of thousands of relevant links to each other. A great hat-tip to Max Klein, OCLC Wikipedian in Residence, for his work in this area.
I don’t deny that VIAF is a very useful tool but if you search for personal name, “Marilyn Monroe,” it returns:
Maybe Sir Tim is right, users “…can discover more things.”
Some of them are related, some of them are not.