What is ISNI as Human Identifier?

What is ISNI as Human Identifier? ISNI is developed by International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to distinguish human names of the creators. For example, books are identified by ISBN, but ISBN it self can not distinguish between two humans. Book titles, unless of a series are not copyright protected, hence two different person with the same name, even academical qualifications who published multiple books each can confuse the End Users. In traditional usage, we write S/O or D/O to identify the human, which is not acceptable in case of creative works. Let us go in to the details about what is ISNI as Human Identifier from developers point of view.

What is ISNI as Human Identifier?

With the deeper generation of cloud computing services and services following the payment and production model of cloud computing, reproduction of digital and physical products related to intellectual rights has been sufficiently increased. Blog is a typical example of high quality self publication. Self publication of Paperback books and Digital Books is slowly rising and possibly will replace the traditional way of publication.

ISNI allows a single entity such as a pen name or business name of a publisher to be identified by a unique number. This unique number can be linked to many other unique identifiers concerning names or other entities.

ISNI is headed by an international agency known as the ISNI-IA. This instance is registered in the UK as a non-profit organization founded by a consortium including CISAC, CENL, IFRRO, IPDA, OCLC and ProQuest. It is managed by directors appointed by these organizations and in the case of CENL, by representatives of the National Library of France and the British Library.

ISNI actually intended to include or replace VIAF (Virtual International Authority File) and hundreds of old methods of identification which are not descriptive in todays usage. ISNI is functionally a part of all the international standard identifiers – DOI, ISAN, ISBN, ISRC, ISSN, ISTC, and ISWC.

How To Get ISNI?

You must register through a registration agency just like done for ISBN with a nominal fee. ISNI core metadata is available in HTML, XML and RD/XML. ISNI is not concerned with search or SERP. ISNI is made up of 16 digits. The last character is a check character. One hundred thousand billion possible combinations can be created with ISNI.

ISNI example :

Working URI:

ISNI is not free and better be purchased/registered by own self as it is like a claim of copyright. If you do not purchase yourself, you might get a free ISNI from some source like Wikipedia article but you can not control it. Automated collection of data has problem of adding errors or omitting important point. We can also instal a ruby gem :

Usage of the ruby gem is like :

The above command will return true as value.