Towards the creation of integrated Authority files in the domain of science and technology: an Italian use case

During the last years, different organizations have developed and shared a number of authority files with normalized personal names (e.g. Virtual International Authority File - VIAF), inviting others to use these sources as a "common language", and contributing to better interoperability among resources/systems. Nevertheless, numerous data providers continue to create and to take advantage of locally developed authority lists mined from the resources managed in local repositories and not aligned with external trustworthy sources. These authority lists often remain locked in local databases inhibiting sharing, re-use and interoperability of their data. This paper aims to present a use case on the creation of integrated and dynamic local authority files referring to personal names of important Italian scientists and academics to be used within a federate Digital Library about Science and Technology. Terminology extraction techniques have been applied to a corpus of 400 documents in the National Centre of Electronic Calculation archive. This resulted in an authority list of 700 personal names that was further aligned with VIAF, and other authorities, such as Library of Congress Classification, via a manual mapping process, thus ensuring its interoperability and retrieval of bibliographic data and topics for each name.