ISNI: consolidating identities, connecting nodes

International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) uniquely identifies the contributors to creative works to facilitate the seamless interconnection, discovery and aggregation of resources; and to build services around scientific and cultural contents. A certified global standard (ISO 27729), ISNI provides an operational response to a decades-long need in the digital information networks of media culture industries including libraries, rights management societies, publishers, etc. Uniqueness, persistence and trust are ensured by a central database managing identifiers for open, global use, governed by a registration authority, the ISNI-International Agency. ISNI relies on computational methods for disambiguating, matching, merging and splitting, augmented with human curation. ISNI is transforming ways of cooperatively consolidating identities by lifting national, cultural and community barriers.