With digital editions creating connections to other projects and contexts and with their integration in the linked data landscape, matching and comparing information across different projects and datasets becomes an important aspect of digital editorial practice: Annotation of entities in TEI XML documents allows both complementing and verifying a project's information and interpretations. In serial or tabular data cleaning contexts, it is common to rely on technical mechanisms and procedures to assist this process of entity reconciliation. This submission argues that the very same mechanisms and procedures can also benefit digital editions and that they should be more than ad hoc solutions, tailored to a particular project and a specific authority database. It presents the Reconciliation API specification that has its origins in the Freebase/OpenRefine software and community, and it discusses how an implementation of the API proposal in the TEI Publisher (TP) platform allows a digital edition to operate both as a client and as a server for reconciliation operations.

The Reconciliation API spec defines ways of matching entities using various hints or conditions, and it includes additional endpoints for providing preview UI components or autocompletion strings. It also includes a data extension facility with which clients can query and adopt arbitrary property values of the entities hosted by the service. The spec follows W3C best practices and is currently at version 1.0-draft, while the W3C Entity Reconciliation Community Group is in the process of transitioning to a W3C Working Group (eventually getting the spec on the W3C standards track).

The TP implementation picks up on work already available in TP's annotation module, where a reconciliation connector has facilitated access to a wide range of authority databases [1] for a while. Besides updating this (client) connector, the presentation introduces a reconciliation server component for TP. This allows the TP instance to act as an authority database for other TP instances' (or its own) annotation connector, or for data cleaning and curation processes in OpenRefine, R, Python etc.

The presentation mentions typical usage scenarios, but it also invites discussions about the definition of entities, properties and concrete heuristics for matching and ranking: While the API spec provides for many entity types and complex matching logic, the current implementation is a proof of concept, restricted to persons and places and to exact, wildcard and regex string matching. Extending this is obviously very welcome, but it is not clear how far a generic component can go and what should be left to each project to define. In that sense, the presentation also seeks to unsettle established reconciliation practices.

[1] See a list of reconciliation services on the Reconciliation service test bench: https://reconciliation-api.github.io/testbench/. This table in effect gets reconciliation service endpoints via a Wikidata SPARQL query and then runs them through a validator to report on the supported API versions and optional features. Future TP-based digital edition projects can thus easily be included.

References

- OpenRefine software: https://openrefine.org/
- Reconciliation Spec Proposal: https://reconciliation-api.github.io/specs/1.0-draft/
- Reconciliation API testbench: https://reconciliation-api.github.io/testbench/0.2/#/
- W3C Entity Reconciliation Community Group: https://www.w3.org/groups/cg/reconciliation/