European Commission logo
JRC Data Catalogue
DATASETCompleted

JRC-Names RDF: Person and organisation spelling variants as found in multilingual news articles

QR code

JRC-Names is a highly multilingual named entity resource for person and organisation names (called 'entities') developed by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC). JRC-Names consists of large lists of names and their many spelling variants (up to hundreds for a single person), including across scripts (Latin, Greek, Arabic, Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese, etc.).

The resource is the by-product of the Europe Media Monitor (EMM, see http://emm.newsbrief.eu/overview.html ) family of applications, which has been analysing up to 220,000 news reports per day, since 2004. EMM recognises names mentioned in the news in over twenty languages and decides automatically for each newly found name whether it belongs to a new entity or whether it is a spelling variant of a previously known entity. This resource allows EMM users to display news about people or organisations even if their names are spelt differently or if the news articles are written in different languages and scripts.

JRC-Names has been available for download since September 2011, consisting of name variant lists and accompanying software. The new linked data edition, accessible through the European Union's Open Data Portal, offers more information compared to the previously released resource and tool, including: titles and function names that have been historically found next to the person mentions; information about the time period during which name variants and their titles were found; various frequency counts; as well as links to other linked datasets such as DBPedia.

INFORMATION ON JRC-NAMES DATA MODEL

The JRC-Names RDF representation is based on lemon (Lexicon Model for Ontologies, see http://lemon-model.net/ ), a model which allows the expression of lexical information relative to ontologies.

JRC entities are modeled as instances of DBpedia classes (dbpedia:Person and dbpedia:Organisation) and the multilingual lexicalizations of their names and function names are represented as Lexical Entries of lemon Lexicons. Various other types of (linguistic) information and metadata are expressed using standardized vocabularies (LexInfo, OLiA, ISOCat, Lexvo, DCTerms, etc.). For cases where no already existing vocabulary could appropriately answer the needs, in-house classes and properties were defined ( see resource JRC data model for JRC names). The 'JRC-Names schema' gives an overview of how JRC-Names data is modeled.

JRC-Names has links towards the following datasets: DBpedia ( http://dbpedia.org/ ), New York Times Open Data ( http://data.nytimes.com/ ) and Talk of Europe ( http://linkedpolitics.ops.few.vu.nl ).

For further information on JRC-Names, see: https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/language-technologies/jrc-names .

Contributors

Guillaume Jacquet; Marco Verile

How to cite

Jacquet, Guillaume; Verile, Marco (2026): JRC-Names RDF: Person and organisation spelling variants as found in multilingual news articles. European Commission, Joint Research Centre [Dataset] doi: 10.2905/JRC.PKP3J7G PID: http://data.europa.eu/89h/jrc-emm-jrc-names

Keywords

JRC-Nameslemonlexical variantslinked datamultilingual linguistic resourcenamed entitiesnatural language processingnews analysisperson and organisation namesperson titlesvariant and title usage time intervals

Data access

JRC-Names, RDF files
RDF N-Triples

RDF N-Triples is a line-based, plain text format for encoding an RDF graph; a concrete syntax for RDF, an easy to parse line-based subset of Turtle.
Downloadable file

A downloadable file for the dataset.

Use conditions
European Commission reuse notice

According to the European Commission reuse notice, reuse is authorised, provided the source is acknowledged. The reuse policy of the European Commission is implemented by the Decision of 12 December 2011. The general principle of reuse can be subject to conditions which may be specified in individual copyright notices. Therefore users are advised to refer to the copyright notices of the individual websites maintained under Europa and of the individual documents. Reuse is not applicable to documents subject to intellectual property rights of third parties.

Access conditions
No limitations

Anybody can directly and anonymously access the data, without being required to register or authenticate.

  • The compressed zip file contains an RDF file containing JRC names and spelling variants of JRC names.

SPARQL endpoint access
HTML

HTML is the standard markup language used to create web pages and its elements form the building blocks of all websites.
Web service/API

A resource that holds a web service to the dataset.

Use conditions
European Commission reuse notice

According to the European Commission reuse notice, reuse is authorised, provided the source is acknowledged. The reuse policy of the European Commission is implemented by the Decision of 12 December 2011. The general principle of reuse can be subject to conditions which may be specified in individual copyright notices. Therefore users are advised to refer to the copyright notices of the individual websites maintained under Europa and of the individual documents. Reuse is not applicable to documents subject to intellectual property rights of third parties.

Access conditions
No limitations

Anybody can directly and anonymously access the data, without being required to register or authenticate.

  • Access to the JRC-Names dataset via the Open Data Portal SPARQL endpoint. Some specific query examples are provided in the SPARQL endpoint webpage.

Other resources

JRC -Names data statistics
Plain text

Plain text is the data (e.g. file contents) that represent only characters of readable material but not its graphical representation nor other objects. It may also include a limited number of characters that control simple arrangement of text, such as line breaks or tabulation characters. Plain text is different from formatted text, where style information is included, and from ‘binary files’ in which some portions must be interpreted as binary objects (encoded integers, real numbers, images, etc.).

Use conditions
European Commission reuse notice

According to the European Commission reuse notice, reuse is authorised, provided the source is acknowledged. The reuse policy of the European Commission is implemented by the Decision of 12 December 2011. The general principle of reuse can be subject to conditions which may be specified in individual copyright notices. Therefore users are advised to refer to the copyright notices of the individual websites maintained under Europa and of the individual documents. Reuse is not applicable to documents subject to intellectual property rights of third parties.

Access conditions
No limitations

Anybody can directly and anonymously access the data, without being required to register or authenticate.

  • Some statistics on JRC-Names

JRC data model for JRC-Names
RDF

RDF – Resource Description Framework – is a standard model for data interchange on the Web. RDF has features that facilitate data merging. RDF extends the linking structure of the Web to use URIs to name the relationship between things as well as the two ends of the link (this is usually referred to as a ‘triple’). Using this simple model, it allows structured and semi-structured data to be mixed, exposed and shared across different applications. This linking structure forms a directed, labeled graph, where the edges represent the named link between two resources, represented by the graph nodes.

Use conditions
European Commission reuse notice

According to the European Commission reuse notice, reuse is authorised, provided the source is acknowledged. The reuse policy of the European Commission is implemented by the Decision of 12 December 2011. The general principle of reuse can be subject to conditions which may be specified in individual copyright notices. Therefore users are advised to refer to the copyright notices of the individual websites maintained under Europa and of the individual documents. Reuse is not applicable to documents subject to intellectual property rights of third parties.

Access conditions
No limitations

Anybody can directly and anonymously access the data, without being required to register or authenticate.

  • Definitions of classes and properties defined by JRC for JRC-names where no already existing vocabulary could appropriately answer the needs.

Publications

Publication
JRC-Names: A freely available, highly multilingual named entity resource

Temporal coverage

From date To date
2004-01-01 N/A

Additional information

Published by
European Commission, Joint Research Centre
Contact email
jrc-emm-support (at) ec.europa.eu
Update frequency
irregular

The event occurs at uneven intervals.

Language(s)
English

English is a member of the West Germanic group of the Germanic languages. It is an official language of almost 60 sovereign states and is now a global lingua franca.It is the third-most-common native language in the world and it is widely learned as a second language.

Data theme(s)
Economy and finance

dataset theme covering the domains of economic activity which involves production, distribution, trade, and consumption of goods and services, and finance activity focusing on the management of money at the individual, company, or government level
Science and technology

dataset theme covering the domains of science and technology, with science being the systematic pursuit of knowledge through testable explanations and predictions across natural, social, and formal disciplines, and technology encompassing the collective techniques, skills, methods, and processes used in producing goods, providing services, or achieving objectives like scientific research

Geographical name(s)
European Union
Issued date
2015-05-19
Created date
14 Dec 2018 10:40
Modified date
30 Apr 2020 19:25
Landing page
https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/language-technologies/jrc-names 
Dataset identifier
http://data.europa.eu/89h/jrc-emm-jrc-names
Other identifiers
Rate this page
Please vote (optional).
An unhandled error has occurred. Reload 🗙