There has been a long term plan to combine actor authorities from the Finnish GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) to a single service where the records could be created, managed and shared. A data model was published in 2016 as a text document with a list of elements, properties and codes (only in Finnish). The plan was presented in English at an IFLA satellite meeting, August 2016: RDA based Data Model of the Finnish Memory Organizations (PDF) by Marja-Liisa Seppälä, Leena Furu-Kallio and Miia Herrala. Two consecutive reviews were written in 2016-2017) including plans for further measures on a centralized and interoperable name metadata service.
In 2020 funding was received to work further on the model and to create a test service with data from all sectors. A draft of the model in RDF forma can be viewed in the Finnish Data Vocabularies Tool , Most of the model properties are skos:equalMatch or skos:closeMatch with properties from the RDA registry.
After viewing the preliminary results from similar projects in Germany, USA and elsewhere, Wikbase was chosen to be tested as the platform solution for this service. We have set up a Wikibase docker instance. All the model properties were added manually to the instance, including some additional properties from Wikidata. The properties will be linked/mapped to the sector based data models and formats such as ISNI, EU Core, MARC21 (libraries), ISAAR CPF, EAC-CPF (archives), SPECTORUM (museums).
A small set of authority data has been collected from GLAM sector databases. Their fields have been mapped with the data model. The next step is to import the authority data records to the Wikbase instance and then review the mappings and data redundancy. We started with the library data set.