Morten, Thank you very much for your post about Open Library. You've explained what we're up to really well, and we appreciate your suggestions for people to contribute! Fantastic!
About the Alternate Names field... this is deliberately unstructured, in the hope that people will add whatever name variants they feel are relevant. This could include transliterations, or perhaps the name variant with the title included (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), or it could include the "library order" variant: Conan Doyle, Arthur, etc. You can separate each different item with a semicolon, so: Conan Doyle, Arthur; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle We're currently working on a tool to allow logged-in members of Open Library to help merge duplicate authors. The hope is that when authors are merged, any alternate representations of their name can be popped into this Alternate Names field, and that that field will eventually be indexed and searchable so people can retrieve an author's name even when searching a variant. Here's a good example of an author with tons of variants (that clog our system) Fyodor Dostoyevsky 337 Fyodor Dostoyevsky 4 Fedor Dostoyevsky 3 Fyodor Dostoyevsky 3 Fyodor Dostoyevsky 3 Dostoyevsky 2 Fyodor Mikhaïlovitch Dostoyevsky 2 DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR, 1821-1881. 2 Fyodor, and Ginsburg, Mirra (translated by) Dostoyevsky 1 Aimee Dostoyevsky 1 Fyodor, Dostoyevsky 1 Fyodor Mikhailovitch Dostoyevsky 1 Fyodor DOSTOYEVSKY 1 We only have birth/death dates recorded for one of those entries, which will be considered the "master" by default. When someone performs a merge, the Master will become "Fyodor Dostoyevsky" and the alternates will be listed as: Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Fedor Dostoyevsky; Dostoyevsky; Fyodor Mikhaïlovitch; DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR, 1821-1881; Fyodor, Dostoyevsky; Fyodor Mikhailovitch Dostoyevsky; Fyodor DOSTOYEVSKY. There's also the potential to expose this info via the API so other systems can compare alternate names and masters with whatever's in their system. Later, there might even be a way to do an additional comparison with other "authoritative" systems out there to do another pass. Cheers, george Morten Juhl-Johansen Zölde-Fejér wrote: > I was writing about Anton P. Chekhov > (http://upstream.openlibrary.org/authors/OL3156833A/Anton_Pavlovitch_Chekhov), > but there is one thing I was unsure of - I have added his name in the > original Russian form as an alternate name, but should I also add > varying transliterations? If I do, how should I separate them? Is there > a system for combining varying transliterations of patronymics and > surnames? > > Yours, > Morten > __ > Morten Juhl-Johansen Zölde-Fejér > http://syntaktisk.dk * [email protected] > _______________________________________________ > Ol-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to > [email protected] _______________________________________________ Ol-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to [email protected]
