In an earlier post I discussed using Open Refine (formerly Google Refine) to clean and reconcile taxon names. I've added an additional service that can be used to reconcile author names that uses the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) API. Using this service we can match authors to VIAF identifiers (you may have noticed these appearing on people's pages in Wikipedia, e.g. Mary J. Rathbun's Wikipedia page lists her VIAF as 61796012).To use the service follow the instructions in the earlier post but add the service:
http://iphylo.org/~rpage/phyloinformatics/services/reconciliation_viaf.php
This service is fairly crude, in particular, I make no attempt to score the matches that VIAR returns because this would require parsing and normalising author names. This could be added if needed. If you want some exmaple names to try, here are some taxonomists:
George A Boulenger
G A Boulenger
Wilhelm Michaelsen
W Michaelsen
Colin Campbell Sanborn
Suzanne Hand
Philip Hershkovitz
Yehudah Leopold Werner
W B Spencer
Norman Platnick
