[Esip-preserve] [esip-semanticweb] Identifiers for people?

[Curt Tilmes]

On 03/07/2012 01:56 PM, Sky Bristol wrote:
> USGS has been working on this issue as well for some time. We've
> done it as part of what we've used "master data management" for in a
> project called ScienceBase. I just cross-posted a blog I'd written a
> while back to a public location that provides an overview on this
> work.
>
> https://my.usgs.gov/confluence/x/dQCfCQ

Very interesting -- thanks so much for posting that.  A lot of
interesting work going on there.  (BTW -- Tom Armstrong says Hi!)

> One of the biggest challenges we are having in a government world
> that we still haven't resolved to satisfaction is dealing with
> Privacy Act concerns. There's all kinds of things that come into
> play when a government agency starts aggregating information on
> people, even when many of them work for us. In that respect, doing
> this under the auspices of DataONE would be a little smoother. :-)

Hmm.. I'll probably have to look into that some more..

> The blog post doesn't talk about IDs specifically, but we've ended
> up storing any number of IDs with people records in
> ScienceBase. We've got Library of Congress name authority IDs, local
> data system IDs, and a variety of others. We do as much automated
> disambiguation every time we encounter a new contact as we can and
> are still working on developing the data librarian practice to fill
> in the human bits.

So anyway, Peter Schoephoester seems like a really popular person at
USGS, (associated with 346,675 items, wow! busy guy!)

His "Person Profile Page" in sciencebase refers to him simply by
number (his "Party Id"):

   http://my.usgs.gov/catalog/catalogParty/show/15322

so it looks like you simply mint a new Party Id for each disambiguated
person/organization you add to the system, then just always use id
15322 whenever you want to refer to that person?


I'll definitely be taking a closer look at sciencebase..

-- 
Curt Tilmes, Ph.D.
U.S. Global Change Research Program
1717 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Suite 250
Washington, D.C. 20006, USA

+1 202-419-3479 (office)
+1 443-987-6228 (cell)
http://globalchange.gov