Authorities Summary

Quick summary of primary information about each authority.

https://id.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/lookup/descriptor?label=diabetes&match=contains&limit=10

Additional Information

Details that are helpful in understanding and working with authorities.

Agrovoc

AGROVOC is a controlled vocabulary covering all areas of interest of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, including food, nutrition, agriculture, fisheries, forestry, environment etc. It is published by FAO and edited by a community of experts.

Stores data in Fuseki triple store and provides SKOSMOS rest API for searching and browse. Includes endpoints...

• SKOSMOS REST APIs - search API (in table above), 
• ONLINE : SKOSMOS : Search & browse
• File for DOWNLOAD. Two distributions are provided: (a) CORE , which only includes AGROVOC concepts (RDF and NT format), and (b) Linked Open Data (LOD) which includes AGROVOC concepts + links to outside resources (NT and NQ format). 
• Public SPARQL endpoint, served by Fuseki version 3.6.0

Information about these can be found at How to Access AGROVOC (Technical Documentation for all Endpoints).

ISNI

ISNI is the ISO certified global standard number for identifying the millions of contributors to creative works and those active in their distribution. The mission of the ISNI International Agency (ISNI-IA) is to assign to the public name(s) a persistent unique identifying number in order to resolve the problem of name ambiguity in search and discovery; and diffuse each assigned ISNI across all repertoires in the global supply chain so that every published work can be unambiguously attributed to its creator wherever that work is described. By achieving these goals, the ISNI will act as a bridge identifier across multiple domains and become a critical component in Linked Data and Semantic Web applications.

ISNI as Linked Data is still in test phase, but a first version is expected to be released, soon.

• The on-line search facility is based on SRU (See above) and allows multiple search keys as well as multiple result formats (xml, rdf/xml, jsonld)
• Linked Data serializations can be retrieved using content negotiation on the ISNI canonical form (isni.org/isni/{ISNI})
• A data dump for testing purposes will soon be available.

LC Search API

LC's HTML results and ATOM results (either as XML or JSON) are actually serializations of the output from LC's internal search API.  There is no daylight, therefore, between the types of searches that can be performed by a human using the HTML UI or by a machine making requests of the service.  LC Search supports generic keyword searching, with no limits of any kind, but only labels and a few other key data points are actually searched.  Notes, for example, are not searchable.  It supports limiting searching to specific datasets and date ranges (undocumented, which is an oversight).  It supports targeted searches for specific labels, tokens (such as LCCNs), or codes.  It supports wildcards, boolean keywords, and negation.  Results are sorted by relevancy and, depending on the type of search, results may be weighted to preference "higher value" resources, such as Names, Subjects, or BF Resources, versus resources that play a supporting role in library data, such as regional encodings or broadcast standards.   With the use of key search limits/filters and wildcarding, it is theoretically possible to make the generic search service closely mimic the LC Suggest API, at least in terms of results (not sure if the sort order can be manipulated easily).   The Search API's output is intentionally generic.

LC Suggest API

LC's Suggest API has received minor enhancements over the years, but is largely the same as implemented back in 2009-2010, when the service was still hosted at lcsh.info.  Its output format is identical.  It is formally undocumented (and how it has managed this long without being formally documented is a bit of a mystery) but LC readily and willingly shares information about not only its existence but how it works.  LC's Suggest API is a left-anchored, wild-carded search of preferred labels, codes (for example a search for "deu" will return "German" from the ISO-6392 dataset), or tokens (such as "sh12345," which is an LCCN).  Results are ordered alphabetically (based on codepoint).  There is some support for limiting based on MADS/RDF type (PersonalName, Topic, Geographic, etc.).  Notably, it does not search variant/alternate labels.  Under the hood, the code is 100% distinct from the code that runs the Search API, mostly so it can better focus on its purpose, which is to return typeahead suggestions as quickly as possible.  The service's output is outdated, a form of JSON that is difficult to work with given today's typeaheads.  It is also limited to only the URI and label of the hit. 

MeSH (Medical Subject Headings)

MeSH also provides a SPARQL endpoint http://id.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/sparql, a SPARQL endpoint option on the API page https://id.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/swagger/ui#/, and a user friendly SPARQL endpoint editor https://id.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/query. SPARQL query results can be returned in a variety of formats including RDF. 

Share-VDE API

1. Description of Share-VDE databases available on Stardog triplestore.

2. Instructions for Share-VDE libraries on how to access databases on Stardog triplestore, with some query example.

3. Stardog indications on HTTP APIs.

We are currently working on SVDE backend infrastructure that will support an ad hoc set of APIs specific to SVDE.