The (translated as ''Integrated Authority File'') or GND is an international
authority file for the organisation of personal names, subject headings and corporate bodies from
catalogues. It is used mainly for
documentation in
libraries and increasingly also by
archives and
museums. The GND is managed by the
German National Library (; DNB) in cooperation with various regional library networks in
German-speaking Europe and other partners. The GND falls under the
Creative Commons Zero (CC0) licence.
The GND specification provides a hierarchy of high-level entities and sub-classes, useful in
library classification, and an approach to unambiguous identification of single elements. It also comprises an
ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of existence, being. It is traditionally understood as the subdiscipline of metaphysics focused on the most general features of reality. As one of the most fundamental concepts, being encompasses all of realit ...
intended for
knowledge representation in the
semantic web
The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable.
To enable the encoding o ...
, available in the
RDF format.
The GND became operational in April 2012 and integrates the content of the following authority files, which have since been discontinued:
* (PND) (Translation: Name Authority File)
* (GKD) (Translation: Corporate Bodies Authority File)
* (SWD) (Translation: Subject Headings Authority File)
* (DMA-EST) (Translation: Uniform Title File of the German Music Archive)
It is referred to by identifiers named ''GND-ID''.
At the time of its introduction on 5 April 2012, the GND held 9,493,860 files, including 2,650,000 personalised names. In July 2020 non-individualized files were deleted. In 2022, the GND held 9,370,736 files, including 5,937,788 personalised names.
The GND participates in the
Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) project.
Types of GND high-level entities
There are six main types of GND entities:
„Entitätencodierung – Vergaberichtlinien“
(pdf)
References
External links
Information pages about the GND
from the German National Library
Search via OGND
()
Bereitstellung des ersten GND-Grundbestandes
DNB, 19 April 2012
From Authority Control to Linked Authority Data
Presentation given by Reinhold Heuvelmann (German National Library) to the ALA MARC Formats Interest Group, June 2012
{{Authority control
Computer-related introductions in 2012
Library cataloging and classification
Unique identifiers
Creative Commons-licensed databases