Names Project Blog

DIGOIDUNA report on digital identifier infrastructures

Amanda Hill — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 09:45:41 +0000

A report on identifiers for digital object and authors has been made available on the website of the EU-funded DIGOIDUNA study team. The project team state that:

The final report of the study is focused on three key objectives:

1. analyzing the fundamental role of identifiers as enablers of value in e-infrastructures and presenting forward looking scenarios as examples of the benefits of a systematic usage of identifiers for digital objects and authors to locate and integrate information from multiple sources;
2. reporting the results of the analysis of the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) associated with establishing in Europe an open, dynamic and sustainable governance of e-infrastructure using identifiers for digital objects and authors;
3. presenting the main challenges and recommendations which European Commission and other relevant stakeholders should address to develop an open and sustainable e-infrastructure for locators of digital objects and identifiers of authors supporting scientific information access, curation and preservation.

The report provides a good analysis of the requirements for establishment of an infrastructure for digital identifiers and maintains that Europe is in a good position to set up initiatives in this area. Some of the issues identified by the report (and familiar to the Names Project team) include: fragmented current approaches, lack of financial sustainability, lack of consensus and resistance to change.

As the authors point out:

…technology is not the main driver in leading this process. Any identifier solution is always used within cultural, geographical, disciplinary and organizational boundaries through a technical system and the process of reaching an agreement between parties over possibly conflicting purposes and objectives is a process which is played out at the interfaces of these boundaries.

EPrints autocompleter using Names API

Amanda Hill — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 09:01:17 +0000

This summer, JISC funded the Names Project to build a plugin for the EPrints software. In this post, developer Phil Cross describes his work on this.

The EPrints software has been designed to ease the process for creating add-ons and customisations for a repository. We wished to provide an automatic search of the Names API when users type author or editor details into an eprint creation form. We also wanted to be able to present disambiguating information to allow the selection of the correct author and to have the Names-assigned person URI added to the eprint metadata.

EPrints creator interface

We discovered that EPrints already has a built-in autocomplete function that searches over existing repository authors and that there is also an existing creator identifier field that allows the system to identify authors of multiple eprints. We therefore created an augmented version of the existing name autocomplete script that searches the Names API. The search pulls back affiliations, fields of interest and publication details as well as name details and the person URI. When this script is inserted into the code for a specific repository, it overrides the global script, adding the new functionality. Simply removing the script returns the repository to its default behaviour.

Drop-down list with Names metadata

The name details are displayed in a drop-down list together with the Names URI. Moving the cursor down the list opens a box next to each entry that contains the disambiguation information. Selecting a name adds the name details and URI to the form.

We were also able to make changes to the context-sensitive help for the author and editor fields. The altered help text contains information about the Names API search and provides a link for authors who wish to add their own details to the Names database.

The Extension Package produced can be used with any EPrints 3.x installation by unzipping the compressed package into the top directory of the chosen repository (a single EPrints installation can run multiple repositories). To disable the Names functionality, the administrator simply needs to delete the three files added. The package and instructions on how to install it are available on the Names site.

EPrints Bazaar

The newest version of EPrints, version 3.3, contains access to a new development called the Bazaar Store. This is an application store for the EPrints platform that enables repository administrators to install EPrints Plugins and Extensions with a single click. We have created a Bazaar Package that is a version of the Names Extension Package and this is now available in the Bazaar store for users of version 3.3.

Names autocompleter in Bazaar Store

Comments on this work are welcome and we are also interested in working with you if you would like to include details of researchers from your institution in the Names system, to help improve the data which is returned from the API and the autocompletion plugin.

Researcher and organisation identifier updates

Amanda Hill — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 12:01:57 +0000

The latest issue of Information Standards Quarterly (ISQ) is devoted to the topic of identifiers for people and organisations. There are featured articles on ISNI and ORCID, an update from the NISO I² group and one from the Names Project.

There was an ORCID outreach meeting in Geneva last week and Ben O’Steen has made a useful summary of the talks and issues that arose there and of the current ORCID strategy.

Data submission specification

Amanda Hill — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 12:49:01 +0000

We’re getting a good response from repositories and institutions who would like to provide information about their researchers to improve the data in the Names system (see previous post for details). As a consequence, a data submission specification has been drawn up by Dan Needham. This lists the mandatory and optional fields that Names needs in order to create or match records for institutional staff. It also explains the best way to format your records.

The table below shows the information we’d like to receive from institutions:

Field	Description	Requirement
Primary author family names		Mandatory
Primary author given names		Mandatory
Primary author title	Name prefix / salutation e.g. Mrs, Dr, Sir …	Optional
Primary author date of birth	YYYY-MM-DD	Optional
Primary author date of death	YYYY-MM-DD	Optional
Primary author fields of interest	Semi-colon delimited list of strings describing fields of interest associated with the individual. Preferably values taken from a controlled of terms, although this is not required.	Optional
Primary author home page	URL of web page that contains information that helps identify the individual e.g. personal homepage, institutional page, linkedin page	Optional
Primary author internal identifier	Your internally used identifier.	Optional
Primary author external identifiers	A list of identifiers from other providers assigned to an individual. The list should be semi-colon delimited and contain alternating values for the identifier provider and the identifier itself, i.e. ;;;	Optional
Result publication title	Please generate a complete new row for each publication given for each author.	Mandatory
Journal title		Optional
Volume		Optional
Issue		Optional
Start page		Optional
End page		Optional
Year of publication	YYYY	Optional
Subject area	Classified subject area, may be different from author’s field of activity.	Optional
ISSN		Optional
DOI		Optional
Co-authors	Semi-colon delimited list of co-author names. May include the primary author name if necessary. Preferably in the format , however if necessary another format is acceptable as long as there is consistency.	Mandatory

There’s also an example record in the required format to illustrate this.

Improving Names data with help from institutions

Amanda Hill — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 08:45:24 +0000

The MERIT data has given us a good corpus of UK researchers’ names to use as the basis of the Names prototype. There are around 45,000 and most have institutional affiliations associated with them, too, which makes them a rich data set. What they don’t have, generally, are full names: they’re usually just surnames and initials.

This is where we need help from UK institutions to improve the data and we’ve recently been testing this process with some information supplied by Robert Gordon University (RGU) in Aberdeen. Researchers at the university were contacted and the aim of the process explained. Having cleared things with their researchers, staff at RGU then extracted information from the OpenAIR institutional repository for staff that were willing to be involved and sent them to the Names team in table form, listing surname, forename(s), publication title, date and publication type.

Sample of RGU data

This data was then matched with existing Names data. 17 names were found to match with individuals already in the database, based on names and article titles. The other names were not in the database: new Names records and persistent identifiers were created for these individuals. Quality assurance on the results of the matching process was carried out by colleagues at the British Library.

Merged Names record for R. A. Laing

In this example, the record for R. A. Laing has been enhanced with the researcher’s full forenames and with additional publications (only the first listed publication was supplied by the MERIT database). This additional information will assist in the establishment of future matches with further sources of names data that become available to the Names team.

If your institution is interested in providing similar data to improve the Names records for your researchers, then we’d love to hear from you. You can contact Dan Needham, the project’s lead developer at daniel.needham@manchester.ac.uk, or if you have any questions, please email project manager Amanda Hill. We can supply you with a sample email which will introduce the project to researchers in your institution if, like RGU, you want to tell them about it.

EPrints plug-in project

Amanda Hill — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 14:57:51 +0000

The Names Project has recently started a new project-within-a-project to build some Names functionality into the EPrints repository software. The survey of UK repository managers undertaken by the project in 2010* showed that a majority (41% of respondents) were using EPrints to run their institutional repositories. This finding is confirmed by the OpenDOAR directory of repositories, which shows EPrints in use by 45% of the 193 repositories it lists for the country.

OpenDOAR repository software analysis

Incorporating Names into EPrints could be useful, therefore, for a large number of repositories in the UK. Our initial plans include developing the following features:

Adapting the existing auto-completion field within EPrints to make a call to the Names API to bring back potential matches from the Names data (and distinguishing them from internal matches in some way)
Associating the Names identifier with creator metadata within EPrints
Allowing the update of existing materials within the repository to associate creator names with their Names identifier and to allow for searching by that identifier, so that all records for an individual can be retrieved, regardless of the form of the name
Modifying output records from EPrints to include the Name identifier
Packaging the resulting plug-in so that it can be made available through the EPrints Bazaar.

Any comments, suggestions, pitfalls you can foresee with this approach?

*Report on the survey [PDF]

Names of Merit

Amanda Hill — Fri, 06 May 2011 10:15:28 +0000

How vain, without the merit, is the name!¹

At the end of October 2010, the Merit project made its cleaned-up version of the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) data available through the project’s website. This data set includes names of the top researchers in the UK (Stephen Hawking, for example, Monica Grady or Brian Cox), with the titles of the materials that were submitted for assessment by their institutions. It seemed to be an ideal set of information for the Names Project to use, as the information includes institutional affiliations, which is not easy to track down from other data sources we’ve been investigating, such as the Zetoc table of contents data from the British Library.

Names records have now been generated for all of the individuals represented in the Merit data. This creates a core of nearly 47,000 disambiguated names of UK researchers for the project, associated with 158 institutions. As a result of the earlier work of the Merit project, the quality of the data was good. There were occasions where individuals had more than one identifier in the Merit data (when their work had been submitted by more than one institution), but these were successfully identified and merged in the disambiguation process.

Our British Library colleagues’ quality assurance process identified only one case where the system wrongly suggested a match. There were two D. J. Siveters listed in the data, one at the University of Leicester, the other at the University of Oxford, both writing on the subject of palaeontology. A little investigation revealed that these were in fact two distinct individuals: twin brothers (Derek and David) working in the same field who often co-author papers. Perhaps these two form the ultimate test of any disambiguation mechanism?

The project team are intending to share the records generated by this process with colleagues working on the ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier) to see if they can identify matches with records in the ISNI data.

¹Homer’s Iliad, Book XVII, translation by Alexander Pope, 1715

Names article in FUMSI

Amanda Hill — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 15:19:04 +0000

An article on the Names project has been published in the latest edition of FUMSI (which stands for Find, Use, Manage and Share Information).

Personal Digital Archiving and identifiers

Amanda Hill — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 14:07:20 +0000

Just a quick post to mention that the videos of talks at the Personal Digital Archiving conference are now available online. The event, organised by the Internet Archives, was held in San Francisco in February and attracted a large number of speakers from a broad range of fields. I wouldn’t have thought that the content of the conference would have been directly relevant to the Names Project, but one of the talks was on the Social Networks and Archival Context project, which is working in a similar space: extracting names from archival finding aids and turning them into authority records. Clifford Lynch’s keynote was also of interest: he mentioned the current interest in unique identification of authors within educational institutions more than once.

Our survey said. . .

Amanda Hill — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 13:45:22 +0000

Stakeholder report (PDF, 771 KB)

In July this year the Names project team went on a feedback spree. We asked our Expert Panel members difficult questions about the project and, at the same time, we surveyed UK institutional repository managers with some slightly easier ones. The response rate was about the same for both exercises, with around a third of each group giving us their views.

We’ve combined the results of these two pieces of work into one report [PDF, 771KB], which is now available from the Names project’s website. Thanks to everyone who took part and to those institutional repository managers I visited in October as a follow-up exercise. Particular thanks are due to Barbara McCormack, who worked extremely hard on the survey.

From the executive summary of the report:

Expert Panel

Seven members responded to the request for feedback. There was general approval among these panel members for the approach that has been taken by the Names Project in developing its prototype and sharing the information within it. The members of the panel were unanimous in their support for the principle of assigning unique identifiers to researchers and making as much of the information associated with those identifiers as possible available as open linked data. Continuing co-operation with related initiatives was seen as important, with Names being just one of an international set of similar name-related services. The potential benefits that could be realised in a range of fields with the availability of Names services were mentioned, with the proviso that trials should be set up as soon as possible to demonstrate these.

In response to questions about sustainability, there were a number of suggestions about possible additional services which could be made available for a fee. It was generally agreed that a basic level of service should be made available free of charge, certainly within the UK research community.

Repository Managers

The survey of repository managers demonstrated that over three-quarters of respondents had encountered problems relating to identification of authors, including issues around variant forms of names or materials being wrongly attributed to authors with similar names. Around two-thirds of the sixty-five respondents thought that names-related functions such as deduplication, disambiguation and data clean-up services would be either useful or very useful. A quarter of respondents indicated a willingness (in principle) to pay for one or more of these services.