Main Content

Authority File Standards

There are differing international and national standards in the area of scientific and academic publishing. ISBN and ISSN are the standards for print publications and DOIs for online articles. ISNI, ORCID, Google Scholar ID, or the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), are for persons. GeoNames and the Getty Thesaurus of Geographical Names are for places and other geographical designations. Iconclass is the standard for the iconographic description of works belonging to the visual arts.

A global directory of existing and accessible controlled vocabularies, authority files, thesauri, ontologies, taxonomies and classification systems is in the process of compilation at Basel University: Basel Register of Thesauri, Ontologies & Classifications (BARTOC).

Joint Integrated Authority File

The authority files of the Integrated Authority File (GND) are the ones primarily used by the science and research institutions in the German-speaking world. The GND contains authority files for historical, living, and fictional persons, for corporate bodies and organisations, works, terms of time and epochs, as well as geographical names. Sections of the data pool of the GND are channelled into the international Standard VIAF – a virtual authority file for personal data.