CWRC Entity system

Understanding the CWRC entity system

The editor is now hooked up to the CWRC entity system. Lookup of all named entities (i.e. person,s, organizations, places, and titles) from within CWRC is now available, as well as lookup in the authoritative linked data sources.

The external VIAF list of authorities, produced from national and major research libraries around the world, is used to link persons, organizations and titles, while GeoNames and GoogleGeocode are employed in a similar capacity for place entities. More such authoritative sources will be added in future.

Once you click on Select a popup appears where you can add additional attributes to the entity. For example, you can declare if the person is real, fictional or both.

It is now possible to add a new entity to the CWRC collection if the person/organization/place/title you are tagging is not found in either of these sets. From the entity lookup pop-up, you can click on the button to create a new entity and you will be taken to a pop-up that allows you to enter the appropriate information. Once created, the new entity will be a reference in your tag/annotations and thereafter you will be able to select it from the CWRC entity list for future tags/annotations.

This new feature of CWRC Writer allows you to seamlessly integrate your documents with the semantic web, which is described in more detail in the documents reference below. To avoid ambiguities when tagging named entities, you can also look up and see exactly what linked data you are adding to your document. Clicking on the small black information circle beside an entity option creates a pop-up with a URL. If you open that URL in a new tab you can now see exactly what information you are adding to your document.

For more information on the lookups available in CWRC-Writer, see the links below.

VIAF: https://viaf.org

GeoNames: http://www.geonames.org

GoogleGeocode: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/