The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) has recently released a multilingual onomastic resource for the names of persons and organizations. The JRC-Names database provides lists of these name types and their many spelling variants (up to several hundred for a single personal name) and includes multiple scripts (e.g. Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese, etc). The resource is the by-product of the Europe Media Monitor (EMM) family of applications, which has been analyzing up to 300,000 news reports per day, since 2004.

The JRC-Names resource and accompanying software are available for download as text.

The new Linked Data resource, accessible through the European Union’s Open Data Portal, also offers supplementary information (e.g. frequency counts, historical onomastic background information, etc.).

The new Linked Data edition is available through a SPARQL endpoint and via a RDF dump. It is registered on the datahub.io portal as JRC-Names.

Additional information is available on this page of EU Open Data Portal.

Considering the popularity of the Broadway musical Hamilton, we aren’t surprised to see interested in “Hamilton” as a baby name. Theater Mania talks to BabyCenter CEO Linda Murray about which other names from the musical might climb the charts.

Donna Woodley’s pop-up exhibition “What’s in a Name?” explores African-American identity and the prejudices in today’s society through names. Why should names like Sarah and Elizabeth be recognized and acceptable spellings by spell-checkers when LaKeisha and Shanica are not?

This event is at Fond Object, 1313 McGavock Pike, Nashville, TN 37216 through October 8th.