Run Publishers through Google Refine

[George]

Be very interested to see whether a quick pass through Gridworks could set us on the path to controlling publisher name.

[Edward Betts (edwardbetts)]

What's the problem you're trying to solve? I think the spec for publishers looks like this:

- Publisher pages that look like subject pages.
- Publish search
- Publisher drop down when editing a book.
- Merge publishers

We can add extra fields about publishers like: Founders, key people, Start date, End Date, street address, country, number of employees, web page, and Wikipedia links. These could come later.

[arielb (ariel-archive)]

gridworks may be a bit heavy handed for this - we can probably just use relevance or recon services:

http://data.labs.freebase.com/recon/query?q={"name": "Penguin", "type": "/book/publishing_company"}

http://api.freebase.com/api/service/search?query=penguin&type=/book/publishing_company

[George (george-archive)]

The problem I'm trying to solve is to do a first pass on reconciling publishers automatically. Since it isn't a controlled field in Library World, there's massive variation in names. If we want pages for publishers, this would be a good first step.

Also, we might be able to something slightly different for publisher pages... like, publishing trends, common subjects, common authors etc. The data/reporting we want might be similar, but I think we should make the page look a bit different so it isn't confusing.

Like to explore pages like /publishers/publisher/subjects too, perhaps.