Wednesday, September 30, 2015

About institutions and companies identifiers

Disentangling unique identity for company/institutions entities has always been a hard task when dealing with bibliometrics and patents data .

Some attempts have been done for example by Thomson Reuter in WOS introducing a field named ORGANIZATION ENHANCED where you can search for  a preferred organization name returns all records that contain the preferred name and all records that contain its name variants, based on self reported names variants available in WOS database.

In patstat recently harmonized names from KUL Leuven have been added to person tables, as well many attempts were done in matching ORBIS and patstat names.

Two more datasources that will be made more relevant also because included in ORCID, are

ISNI and RINGGOLD identifiers.

ISNI is an ISO standard, in use by numerous libraries, publishers, databases, and rights management organizations around the world. As an open standard, ISNI is not a proprietary "walled garden" - it is diffused widely on the open web, and is a critical component in Linked Data and Semantic Web applications.

The ISNI is not intended to provide direct access to comprehensive information about a "Public Identity" - instead, it is designed to act as a 'bridge identifier' to link systems where comprehensive information is held, such as Ringgold’s Identify Database.

The latter has been built upon ISNI and adds also other info, like hierarchy, institution data etc.

We named ORCID previously: Users may include employment and education affiliations in their ORCID Records. Affiliations must include an institution's name and address but should also include a unique identifier to disambiguate the institution. Currently, ORCID uses Ringgold organization identifiers to generate a pick-list of organizations.


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