The disambiguation of people names in biological collections

Abstract

Scientific collections have been built by people. For hundreds of years, people have collected, studied, identified, preserved, documented and curated collection specimens. Understanding who those people are is of interest to historians, but much more can be made of these data by other stakeholders once they have been linked to the people’s identities and their biographies. Knowing who people are helps us attribute work correctly, validate data and understand the scientific contribution of people and institutions. We can evaluate the work they have done, the interests they have, the places they have worked and what they have created from the specimens they have collected. The problem is that all we know about most of the people associated with collections are their names written on specimens. Disambiguating these people is the challenge that this paper addresses. Disambiguation of people often proves difficult in isolation and can result in staff or researchers independently trying to determine the identity of specific individuals over and over again. By sharing biographical data and building an open, collectively maintained dataset with shared knowledge, expertise and resources, it is possible to collectively deduce the identities of individuals, aggregate biographical information for each person, reduce duplication of effort and share the information locally and globally. The authors of this paper aspire to disambiguate all person names efficiently and fully in all their variations across the entirety of the biological sciences, starting with collections. Towards that vision, this paper has three key aims: to improve the linking, validation, enhancement and valorisation of person-related information within and between collections, databases and publications; to suggest good practice for identifying people involved in biological collections; and to promote coordination amongst all stakeholders, including individuals, natural history collections, institutions, learned societies, government agencies and data aggregators.

Creating a multi-linked dynamic dataset: a case study of plant genera named for women

“…As a hub for other identifiers, it plays a central role in semantic linking and enriching of data (e.g. Groom et al (2020) , Groom et al (2022) , Page (2022) , Page (2023) ). Wikidata properties mentioned in the text are given in italics followed by the Wikidata entity link.…”

“…Wikidata notability criteria were followed when creating new items. Our work also included disambiguation from other people with identical or similar names ( Groom et al 2020 , Groom et al 2022 ). We added any relevant identifiers for the woman to her Wikidata item, thus creating connections to other databases.…”

“…Our work in creating this dataset was motivated by the desire to amplify the contribution of women to botany through eponymy. We were inspired by the “ Funk List ” which has helped make women scientists and their contributions more visible ( Kapsalis 2019 , Wagner and Wen 2023 ) and by recent work in creating identifiers for people to uncover contributions that have hitherto remained hidden ( Groom et al 2020 , Groom et al 2022 ). Here, we deliberately have not compared the differences between eponyms based on female names and those based on the names of men - our intention is to amplify women’s contributions to botany through a unique dataset that has developed as Open Science by linking and adding to multiple other data sources as the work continued.…”

Paying it forward: Crowdsourcing of taxonomic harmonization and linking of biodiversity identifiers

“…Wikidata is already used in the life sciences for purposes such as crowdsourcing biological ontologies and datamining for drug discovery and disease diagnosis (Waagmeester et al 2020). In biodiversity informatics, it has been proposed as a platform for a "bibliography of life"-a comprehensive linked database of the taxonomic literature (Page 2022), and to disambiguate personal names in collection records (Groom et al 2022).…”