R toolbox for NACO and CJK name authority comparison

Alan Engel 27 September, 2024

The Library of Congress’s Authority File Comparison Rules (NACO Normalization) were finalized in 2009 for the specific purpose of determining whether or not names in the 4XX fields can be added to the 1XX fields. If the comparision rules find that a name in a 4XX field already exists, in normalized form, in the 1XX fields, it cannot be added.[Hickey, Toves, and O’Neill (2006)](Library of Congress, Policy, Training, and Cooperative Programs Division 2020)

Thanks to a splendid new R package, stringi, developed by Marek Gagolewski,(Gagolewski 2022) the comparison rules can be implemented using calls to the ICU4C library from the International Components for Unicode. A step-by-step walk through vignette shows how the comparison rules are executed using stringi functions.

This package is a sibling of a R package viafr, which was forked from Stefanie Schneider’s viafr package on Github.(Stefanie Schneider and Alan Engel 2024) In a related project, viafr development is aimed at extracting information, for example, social networks based on coauthors, from the Virtual International Authority Files (VIAF). Normalization functionality for that package will be built and maintained in rnaco.

Features

Functions

• get_transliteration_rules() Fetch transliteration rules for use in stringi::stri_trans_general()

• moji_transform() Normalizing transform based on MojiJoho variants

• multiform_transform() CJK normalizing transform with user-selectable form (JA, TW or ZH)

• naco_transform() This function follows the Authority File Comparison Rules using stringi(Gagolewski 2022) to implement the International Components for Unicode. The derivation of naco_transform() is detailed in a walk-through vignette, rnaco::naco.

• show_cluster() Display ideographic clusters used in normalizing transform

• xml2df() This function reads a specially structured xml, and produces a tibble.

Data

Of course, development based on NACO did not end in 2009 and is included in the NACO - Name Authority Cooperative Program. This package is intended to facilitate following developments and includes test datasets from the CJK NACO Project. In particular, each build of the rnaco project downloads several related files, which are then included as tibbles(Müller and Wickham 2023) in package data.

MARC code tables

Dataset	Description
marcNotes	Names, XPaths and notes for MARC-8 code tables
marcBasicArabic	Basic Arabic code table, ISOcode=33 (July 2001)
marcBasicCyrillic	Basic Cyrillic code table, ISOcode=4E (January 2000)
marcBasicGreek	Basic Greek code table, ISOcode=53 (January 2000)
marcBasicHebrew	Basic Hebrew code table, ISOcode=32 (January 2000)
marcBasicLatinASCII	Basic Latin (ASCII) code table (January 2000) ISOcode=42
marcComponentInputMethodCharacters	Component Input Method Characters code table (February 6, 2003)
marcEastAsianIdeographsHan	East Asian Ideographs (‘Han’) code table (February 6, 2003)
marcEastAsianPunctuationMarks	East Asian Punctuation Marks code table (February 6, 2003)
marcExtendedArabic	Extended Arabic code table, ISO code 34 (July 2001)
marcExtendedCyrillic	Extended Cyrillic code table, ISO code 51 (January 2000)
marcExtendedLatinANSEL	Extended Latin (ANSEL) code table, ISO code 45 (January 2000, Updated September 2004)
marcGreekSymbols	Greek Symbols
marcJapaneseHiraganaandKatakana	Japanese Hiragana and Katakana code table (February 6, 2003)
marcKoreanHangul	Korean Hangul code table (February 6, 2003)
marcSubscripts	Subscripts
marcSuperscripts	Superscripts

Datasets for naco_transform()

Dataset	Description
numericrules	Transliteration rules for numeric decimals
step6rulestring	Transliteration rule for Step 6 of naco_transform()
step7lltranslitrule	Transliteration rule for Step 7 of naco_transform()
unconditionalMappings	Unconditional mappings for naco_transform()

Datasets for CJK normalization

Dataset	Description
unihan_variants	Unihan CJK variants
mojiMapdf	Mapping of Moji Joho
mojiVariants	Moji Joho variants
kyoikuKanji	Kanji by grade level in Japan
zhXiaoxueWenzi	Ideographs by grade level in PRC
twXiaoxueWenzi	Ideographs by grade level in TW
jctPrecedence	Precedence schemes for variant clusters

Datasets for testing

This data comes from personal name authority records that were developed by the NACO CJK Funnel References Project as a source of Chinese, Japanese and Korean names for testing and development.

Dataset	Description
cjkextractja	Personal name authority records - Japanese names
cjkextractko	Personal name authority records - Korean names
cjkextractzh	Personal name authority records - Chinese names

Vignettes

• MARC Tables for NACO: For each build, this script downloads the MARC code lists in XML format and extracts the code table listed above.

• rnaco::naco: Authority comparison (NACO) rules walk-through

• rnaco::nacoDatasets: Datasets for Authority File Comparison Rules (NACO Normalization)

• rnaco::unihanVariants: Unihan Variants Table for rnaco including analysis of their use in VAIF normalization of CJK names

• rnaco::integrated-variant-map: An in-progress effort to combine NACO, Unihan variants and MojiJoho variants into an internally coherent scheme for normalization

Installation

You can install the latest version of rnaco from github with:

library(devtools)
devtools::install_github("kijinosu/rnaco")

Other simlar work

• pynaco is a fork by University of North Texas Libraries of Python sample code that was on the OCLC Research Website.

R packages used for this package

• DataPackageR - Set up and put the pieces together (Finak et al. 2018)

• dplyr - (Wickham et al. 2023)

• igraph - (Csardi and Nepusz 2006)

• readxl - (Wickham and Bryan 2023)

• stringi - (Gagolewski 2022)

• tibble - (Müller and Wickham 2023)

• tidyr - (Wickham, Vaughan, and Girlich 2024)

• viafr(fork) - (Stefanie Schneider and Alan Engel 2024)

• xml2 - (Wickham, Hester, and Ooms 2023)

• xslt = (Ooms 2024)

References

Csardi, Gabor, and Tamas Nepusz. 2006. “The Igraph Software Package for Complex Network Research.” InterJournal Complex Systems: 1695. https://igraph.org.

Finak, G, B Mayer, W Fulp, P Obrecht, A Sato, E Chung, D Holman, and R Gottardo. 2018. “DataPackageR: Reproducible Data Preprocessing, Standardization and Sharing Using r/Bioconductor for Collaborative Data Analysis [Version 2; Referees: 2 Approved, 1 Approved with Reservations].” Gates Open Research 2 (31). https://doi.org/10.12688/gatesopenres.12832.2.

Gagolewski, Marek. 2022. “stringi: Fast and Portable Character String Processing in R.” Journal of Statistical Software 103 (2): 1–59. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v103.i02.

Hickey, Thomas B., Jenny Toves, and T. O’Neill Edward. 2006. “NACO Normalization: A Detailed Examination of the Authority File Comparison Rules.” Library Resources & Technical Services 50 (3): 166–72. https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/naco-normalization-detailed-examination-authority/docview/216890715/se-2.

Library of Congress, Policy, Training, and Cooperative Programs Division. 2020. “Descriptive Cataloging Manual: Z1: Name and Series Authority Records.” August 2020. https://www.loc.gov/aba/publications/FreeDCM/DCM/Z01.pdf.

Müller, Kirill, and Hadley Wickham. 2023. Tibble: Simple Data Frames. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=tibble.

Ooms, Jeroen. 2024. Xslt: Extensible Style-Sheet Language Transformations. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=xslt.

Stefanie Schneider, and Alan Engel. 2024. Viafr: (Fork) Interface to the ’VIAF’ (’Virtual International Authority File’) API. https://github.com/kijinosu/viafr.

Wickham, Hadley, and Jennifer Bryan. 2023. Readxl: Read Excel Files. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=readxl.

Wickham, Hadley, Romain François, Lionel Henry, Kirill Müller, and Davis Vaughan. 2023. Dplyr: A Grammar of Data Manipulation. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=dplyr.

Wickham, Hadley, Jim Hester, and Jeroen Ooms. 2023. Xml2: Parse XML. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=xml2.

Wickham, Hadley, Davis Vaughan, and Maximilian Girlich. 2024. Tidyr: Tidy Messy Data. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=tidyr.