Dear all,
I would like to announce that the Reconciliation API is implemented at the Reference Data Service (RDS) hosted by Swiss Art Research Infrastructure (SARI, https://swissartresearch.net/).
The idea is to provide a couple of reference data sets such as AAT, ULAN, GND, GeoNames and Wikidata as a hosted service for researchers in the Digital Humanities.
Find the system in action here: https://rds.swissartresearch.net/
There is now also an entry in the testbench (currently only configured for JSONP).
The lookup uses the underlying RDF database's native search facilities and is quite configurable and flexible. As an example, the setup for RDS is based on Blazegraph with native indexing and searching with each dataset stored in a separate named graph whereas Wikidata is accessed via federation.
To support disambiguation we generate descriptions per entity type based on a set of properties, e.g. for a person this might include their country of origin, affiliation and life span, for other entity types other properties.
Besides simple lookup of entities we also show cross-links between datasets. The cross-links are materialized based on the various interlinks between datasets. This makes use of a custom extension to the result format (a new field "reference" which may point to another entry which we use to group related entries together).
Additionally, researchers can collect their own data in their own "satellite" system (a so-called RDS-local instance) and contribute that data to the central hub for others to reuse it. This makes use of a federated reconciliation approach based on the Reconciliation API.
The software was developed by metaphacts in collaboration with the University of Zürich (UZH). We have a blog post which describes the system in more detail:
https://blog.metaphacts.com/an-interconnected-system-for-reference-data
Best regards,
Wolfgang
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Wolfgang Schell
Principal Software Architect
metaphacts GmbH
Daimlerstraße 36, 69190 Walldorf, Germany
Tel: +49 6227 6989965
Authorized Representatives: Sebastian Schmidt (CEO), Dr. Peter Haase, Dr. Daniel Herzig-Sommer
Company Register: Mannheim, HRB 720635