Reconciliation
Reconciliation is a process of ensuring that people, places, attributes, events, and other entities in a dataset refer to stable Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), ideally from stable, standard namespaces. The benefit of entity reconciliation is that it improves access and interoperability across institutions, is more efficient when searching, storing, and retrieving data, improves the quality of description, and requires fewer resources to maintain over time. It also allows multiple datasets to be connected, as they refer to the same things in the same way. Reconciling entities within a discrete dataset to standard authority records allows machines to recognize entities across platforms and systems.
Examples​
- Virtual International Authority File (2021) “Cuthland, Ruth”
Further Resources​
- OpenRefine (2022) “Reconciling”
- Rob Sanderson (2016) “Linked Data Snowball or Why We Need Reconciliation” [PowerPoint]
- Smith-Yoshimura (2016) “Metadata Reconciliation”