WorldCat Identities has a summary page for every name in WorldCat (currently some 30 million names) including named persons, organizations and fictious characters. The pages include information derived from WorldCat and other sources (VIAF, FAST) plus with unique data derived or created through a variety of special processing activities (e.g., WorldCat Identities provides statistical data about how widely held a work is). A typical WorldCat Identities page will include a list of most widely held-by-libraries works by and about the identity, a list of variant forms of name the identity has been known by, a FAST tag cloud of places, topics, etc. closely related to works by and about the person, links to co-authors, and more. Titles listed are linked to WorldCat.org, and in many popular WorldCat Identities pages, links to the corresponding Wikipedia (English language) article are provided.

In WorldCat.org displays, the "Find more information about:" feature provides links to WorldCat Identities pages for the named persons, organizations and fictious characters associated with the material being described.

To allow OCLC Research to experiment with new features, we maintain a Research version in addition to the pages that are available via WorldCat.org.

Background

WorldCat Identities arose from a "what if?" exploration led by Chief Scientist Thom Hickey with other members of what would become the WorldCat Identities team. The idea was to explore automatically assembling as much information as possible from WorldCat and other resources stewarded by OCLC about a given person, organization or fictious character and present an algorithmically-built presentation of that information. This work was significantly aided by OCLC Research's work with FRBRizing WorldCat (i.e.. identifying and clustering variant editions of individual works) which allowed OCLC Research to do data mining to identify, say, the most widely held work authored by person and more.

OCLC Research creates the pages used by WorldCat.org, and we plan to experiment with allowing splits and merges of Identity pages in our version of the service.

Outputs

We create quarterly updates of Identity pages.

Most recent updates: Page content: 2012-07-23 Prototype: 2007-08-23

ResearchWorks

This activity is part of ResearchWorks. Use of our prototypes is subject to OCLC's terms and conditions. By continuing past this point, you agree to abide by these terms.


Try the online demo

This activity is a part of the Metadata Management theme.

We are a worldwide library cooperative, owned, governed and sustained by members since 1967. Our public purpose is a statement of commitment to each other—that we will work together to improve access to the information held in libraries around the globe, and find ways to reduce costs for libraries through collaboration.
http://www.oclc.org/research/themes/data-science/identities.html
www.oclc.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2016-44
40760
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:VHK7JGGLUZJSKC3TTGM5TD34NQW4I6Q6
<urn:uuid:96c752c5-e2ad-4776-9175-fa3e22fe1fe9>
2016-10-24T14:12:08Z
132.174.1.212
sha1:VKQVQPJAGOFR3X3VYWBOQ5H3M26WD74E
<urn:uuid:ff44da78-1b6a-4d89-84f7-5c5076a10f93>
http://www.oclc.org/research/themes/data-science/identities.html
response
<urn:uuid:761e45f2-8603-4dca-a0eb-02b24b01f572>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2016-44
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for October 2016
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf