DwC Agent
Ruby 3.0 gem that cleanses messy Darwin Core terms like recordedBy or identifiedBy prior to passing to its dependent Namae gem, which executes the parsing. It also produces similarity scores between two given names.
Usage
require "dwc_agent"
names = DwcAgent.parse '13267 (male) W.J. Cody; 13268 (female) W.E. Kemp'
=>
[#<struct Namae::Name family="Cody", given="W.J.", suffix=nil, particle=nil, dropping_particle=nil, nick=nil, appellation=nil, title=nil>,
#<struct Namae::Name family="Kemp", given="W.E.", suffix=nil, particle=nil, dropping_particle=nil, nick=nil, appellation=nil, title=nil>]
Parsing is occasionally messy & so it is advisable to make use of the additional clean
method for each parsed name.
require "dwc_agent"
names = DwcAgent.parse 'Chaboo, Bennett, Shin'
=>
[#<struct Namae::Name family=nil, given="Chaboo", suffix=nil, particle=nil, dropping_particle=nil, nick=nil, appellation=nil, title=nil>,
#<struct Namae::Name family=nil, given="Bennett", suffix=nil, particle=nil, dropping_particle=nil, nick=nil, appellation=nil, title=nil>,
#<struct Namae::Name family=nil, given="Shin", suffix=nil, particle=nil, dropping_particle=nil, nick=nil, appellation=nil, title=nil>]
DwcAgent.clean names[0]
=> #<struct Namae::Name family="Chaboo", given=nil, suffix=nil, particle=nil, dropping_particle=nil, nick=nil, appellation=nil, title=nil>
A cleaned name might produce all nil attributes if it does not pass logic checks. You can use a utility method to see if this is the case:
if cleaned_name != DwcAgent.default
# Do something with the Namae::Name attributes
else
# Perhaps use your unparsed input some other way
end
There's also a similarity score to compare the structure of two given names. The greater the score, the more likely aliases refer to the "same" name. For instance, "John C." scores a 2 when compared to "John Charles", a 1.1 when compared to "John" alone whereas it scores a 0 when compared to "Joshua" or "John R.". If two names share the same family name, this utility method could be used to down-weight search results if the given name portions of the names are unlikely matches.
require "dwc_agent"
score = DwcAgent.similarity_score('John C.', 'John')
=> 1.1
Or, from the command-line:
gem install dwc_agent
dwcagent "13267 (male) W.J. Cody; 13268 (female) W.E. Kemp"
=> [{"title":null,"appellation":null,"given":"W.J.","particle":null,"family":"Cody","suffix":null,"dropping_particle":null,"nick":null},{"title":null,"appellation":null,"given":"W.E.","particle":null,"family":"Kemp","suffix":null,"dropping_particle":null,"nick":null}]
gem install dwc_agent
dwcagent-similarity "John C." "John"
=> 1.1
License
dwc_agent is released under the MIT license.
Support
Bug reports can be filed at https://github.com/bionomia/dwc_agent/issues.
Copyright
Authors: David P. Shorthouse
Copyright (c) 2024