Authority Files and the Text+ Data Space

Effective use of research data heavily relies on efficient findability and discoverability. For users, this means optimising access and retrieval services to ensure both recall and precision. In the NFDI consortium Text+, which supports text- and language-based sciences, the Text+ Data Space is developed as a service architecture that leverages authority files to improve metadata quality and research data interoperability. This semantic "backbone" is essential for enhancing research data connectivity and addressing the technical heterogeneity across sci-entific disciplines, as well as ensuring interoperability with external partners in the NFDI. A key player in this architecture is the Gemeinsame Normdatei (GND), an Integrated Au-thority File containing over 10 million records spanning entities such as people, organisations, geographic locations, events, and subjects. Linked to international authority files like those of the British Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Library of Congress, GeoNames, OR-CID, and Wikidata, the GND offers a powerful tool for enriching data and ensuring disambig-uation. Text+ actively promotes the use of the GND and other authority files within its data centers and supports their application in all infrastructure components related to search and retrieval. These applications focus on integrating authority files and controlled vocabularies into various systems, offering user-centered access to a diverse range of resources, some of which are still in early implementation stages. For instance, the Federated Content Search (FCS) serves as the central application in Text+ for accessing linguistic resources in a federated research environment. Authority files play an increasing role in the annotation of text corpora, dictionaries, and similar resources. FCS facilitates retrieval based on disambiguated mentions of named entities, enhancing both the technical structure and user interface. The Text+ Registry is a central cross-domain tool that records and links resources such as lexical resources, collections, and editions on a metadata level. Where appropriate, resource information is linked to authority files, making it easier to refine queries and visualize relation-ships. The Registry's focus is on content granularity, quality, and the modularity of its data models, reflecting the research-driven approach within Text+. To further enhance these efforts, a dedicated Text+ GND Agency was established to meet the needs of the research community. The agency offers guidance on applying GND identifi-ers, consulting on vocabulary-driven search strategies, and assisting in enriching datasets with relevant authority data. Currently, the agency focuses on building a technical infrastructure to streamline workflows among data providers, the agency, and the GND. As a cross-cutting service within Text+, the GND Agency promotes the use, integration, and enrichment of au-thority files in research data. Our current focus is on further linking the applications and resources provided by our data centers. A key development in this area is the increasing use of auto-suggestion tools that recommend relevant GND entities during metadata registration and search processes. These tools lower the barrier to adopting controlled vocabularies and ensure more accurate and comprehensive retrieval results. By promoting authority file-based metadata at both data en-try and annotation stages, we aim to make authority file usage the standard rather than the exception.