ABES (Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education) and BnF (Bibliothèque nationale de France) in France are jointly involved in an initiative to build a central national platform for the description of “entities”, including persons, corporate bodies, works, concepts, places…

The challenge is to create and maintain centrally and cooperatively information about entities documented in the collections held by libraries and other cultural heritage and research institutions in France. Key objectives also include, but are not limited to : better integrate into the Web of data the reference datasets created by such institutions and facilitate the use of data by any interested community; share efforts and increase possibilities to collectively improve data quality; develop a shared data strategy.