For yet another data set and API that may or may not meet your needs,
consider VIAF -- Virtual International Authority File, operated by OCLC.
The VIAF's dataset includes the LC NAF as well as other national
authority files, I'm not sure if the API is suitable to limiting matches
to the LC NAF, I haven't done much work with it, but I know it has an API.
http://oclc.org/developer/develop/web-services/viaf.en.html
On 9/29/14 10:18 AM, Trail, Nate wrote:
The ID.loc.gov site has a good known label service described here under "known label
retrieval" :
http://id.loc.gov/techcenter/searching.html
Use Curl and content negotiation to avoid screen scraping, for example, for LC
Name authorities:
curl -L -H "Accept: application/rdf+xml"
"http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/label/Library%20of%20Congress";
Nate
==========================
Nate Trail
LS/TECH/NDMSO
Library of Congress
n...@loc.gov
-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Simon
Brown
Sent: Monday, September 29, 2014 9:38 AM
To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Reconciling corporate names?
You could always web scrape, or download and then search the LCNAF with some
script that looks like:
#Build query for webscraping
query = paste("http://id.loc.gov/search/?q=";, URLencode("corporate name here "),
"&q=cs%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fid.loc.gov%2Fauthorities%2Fnames")
#Make the call
result = readLines(query)
#Find the lines containing "Corporate Name"
lines = grep("Corporate Name, result)
#Alternatively use approximate string matching on the downloaded LCNAF data query <-
agrep("corporate name here",LCNAF_data_here)
#Parse for whatever info you want
...
My native programming language is R so I hope the functions like paste,
readLines, grep, and URLencode are generic enough for other languages to have
some kind of similar thing. This can just be wrapped up into a for
loop:
for(i in 1:40000){...}
Web scraping the results of one name at a time would be SLOW and obviously
using an API is the way to go but it didn't look like the OCLC LCNAF API
handled Corporate Name. However, it sounds like in the previous message
someone found a work around. Best of luck! -Simon
On Mon, Sep 29, 2014 at 8:45 AM, Matt Carruthers <mcarr...@umich.edu> wrote:
Hi Patrick,
Over the last few weeks I've been doing something very similar. I was
able to figure out a process that works using OpenRefine. It works by
searching the VIAF API first, limiting results to anything that is a
corporate name and has an LC source authority. OpenRefine then
extracts the LCCN and puts that through the LCNAF API that OCLC has to
get the name. I had to use VIAF for the initial name search because
for some reason the LCNAF API doesn't really handle corporate names as
search terms very well, but works with the LCCN just fine (there is
the possibility that I'm just doing something wrong, and if that's the
case, anyone on the list can feel free to correct me). In the end,
you get the LC name authority that corresponds to your search term and
a link to the authority on the LC Authorities website.
Anyway, The process is fairly simple to run (just prepare an Excel
spreadsheet and paste JSON commands into OpenRefine). The only
reservation is that I don't think it will run all 40,000 of your names
at once. I've been using it to run 300-400 names at a time. That
said, I'd be happy to share what I did with you if you'd like to try
it out. I have some instructions written up in a Word doc, and the
JSON script is in a text file, so just email me off list and I can send them to
you.
Matt
Matt Carruthers
Metadata Projects Librarian
University of Michigan
734-615-5047
mcarr...@umich.edu
On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 7:03 PM, Karen Hanson
<karen.han...@ithaka.org>
wrote:
I found the WorldCat Identities API useful for an institution name
disambiguation project that I worked on a few years ago, though my
goal wasn't to confirm whether names mapped to LCNAF. The API
response
includes
a LCCN, and you can set it to fuzzy or exact matching, but you would
need to write a script to pass each term in and process the results:
http://oclc.org/developer/develop/web-services/worldcat-identities.en.
html
I also can't speak to whether all LC Name Authorities are
represented, so there may be a chance of some false negatives.
OCLC has another API, but not sure if it covers corporate names:
https://platform.worldcat.org/api-explorer/LCNAF
I suspect there are others on the list that know more about the
inner workings of these APIs if this might be an option for you...
:)
Karen
-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf
Of Ethan Gruber
Sent: Friday, September 26, 2014 3:54 PM
To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Reconciling corporate names?
I would check with the developers of SNAC (
http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/), as they've spent a lot of
time developing named entity recognition scripts for personal and
corporate names. They might have something you can reuse.
Ethan
On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 3:47 PM, Galligan, Patrick <
pgalli...@rockarch.org
wrote:
I'm looking to reconcile about 40,000 corporate names against
LCNAF to see whether they are authorized strings or not, but I'm
drawing a blank about how to get it done.
I've used http://freeyourmetadata.org/ for reconciling subject
headings before, but I can't get it to work for LCNAF. Has anyone
had any experience in a project like this? I'd love to hear some
ideas for automatically dealing with a large data set like this
that we did not create and do not know how the names were created.
Thanks!
-Patrick Galligan
--
Simon Brown
simoncbr...@gmail.com
simoncharlesbrown (Skype)
831.440.7466 (Phone)
*Following our will and wind we may just go where no one's been -- MJK*
