EATS: an Entity Authority Tool Set

Abstract

Authority control has long been used in library catalogue systems to handle the problem of ambiguous identifiers for entities, especially authors. With electronic and networked collections the need for authority control is only increased, and made more important by the possibility of extending defined entities to cover the content of full-text collections. The Entity Authority Tool Set (EATS) is a web application for recording, editing, and using authority information about entities. EATS was developed at the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (NZETC) and is now used to manage the 30,000+ entities represented in the NZETC online collection of signicant New Zealand and Pacific Island texts. This paper sets out the requirements for an entity authority system and makes the case that no existing system suits all of those needs. It presents the EATS model for representing entity authority information, and describes the NZETC implementation of the model along with associated tools.