Taking Entity Reconciliation Offline

Entity reconciliation—linking names or terms to identifiers in external datasets—is a popular method of adding standardized structured data to loosely structured documents. Most approaches to entity reconciliation rely on remote web services, requiring network access during the reconciliation process. For use cases that rely on a “human in the loop” (reconciling entities during the authoring process), this requirement may be a problem. To address this problem, we investigated the feasibility of offline entity reconciliation against the Virtual International Authority File. Offline entity reconciliation was implemented by taking advantage of newly standardized browser storage interfaces to store and query parts of this large dataset locally. We present the results of this investigation and our comparison of the performance, scalability, ease of implementation, and cross-browser compatibility of the various options for storing entity data locally.