Uses for International Standard Name Identifiers?

Question

ISO published ISO 27729 earlier this year, see http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=44292

The standard describes the ISNI - International Standard Name Identifier - "whose scope is the identification of Public Identities of parties: that is, the identities used publicly by parties involved throughout the media content industries in the creation, production, management, and content distribution chains." (Taken from http://www.isni.org/).

Does anyone a) have heard of it or b) has plans to use this?

Answer 1

About one year ago, Thom Hickey (OCLC) blogged a nice article clarifying main differences and commonalities between ORCID, VIAF, and ISNI.

Answer 2

It was mentioned by Graham Bell (EDItEUR) last week at the Library Linked Data seminar in Florence. See slides http://leo.cilea.it/index.php/jlis/article/view/5487/5979 (slide nr. 24). And: http://www.editeur.org/39/ISNI/

So I guess EDItEUR might tell you more

Answer 3

As I understand ISNI, it's meant to be a superset of VIAF, ORCID, and whatever other name-authority controllers choose to buy in. ISNI is supposed to work a little bit like domain names; the main ISNI International Agency can bless "Registration Authorities" which do the actual handing out of identifiers.

ISNI seems to have originally grown out of the media licensing industries, but my sense is that they'll work with anyone who has a need for authority control.

Answer 4

It looks like there is (at least one) pointer from the ISNI database to VIAF:

http://isni.oclc.nl/DB=1.2/CMD?ACT=SRCHA&IKT=8006&SRT=&TRM=ken+follett

which points at:

http://viaf.org/viaf/64005683/

It's too bad the links to ISNI aren't present (yet) in the VIAF RDF data though:

http://viaf.org/viaf/64005683.rdf