A hybrid approach to co-reference identification within museum collections

Locating specific resources within museum collections represents a major challenge for users. Even when catalogues exist in a searchable digital format (which is not certain), formatting differences and the nature of the information to be encoded mean that there is a very large degree of variation in records not just from different catalogues but within individual catalogues. The nature of the data being searched means that traditional search techniques are badly suited to the challenges of identifying similar records in collections. In this paper we discuss a fuzzy rule based approach for identifying similarities between records and to identify co-referent records across multiple heritage collections. We also describe the application of this approach to real world collections and records which demonstrates some promising early results.