Metadata for Name Disambiguation and Collocation

Searching names of persons, families, and organizations is often difficult in online databases because different persons or organizations frequently share the same name and because a single person’s or organization’s name may appear in different forms in various online documents. Databases and search engines can use metadata as a tool to solve the problem of name ambiguity and name variation in online databases. This article describes the challenges names pose in information retrieval and some emerging name metadata databases that can help ameliorate the problems. Effective name disambiguation and collocation increase search precision and recall and can improve assessment of scholarly work.