Interoperable standards on authority control. Trends for semantic digital libraries

Communities of practice proceeded from web and from cultural heritage institutions worked on parallel lines to achieve the same objective: to transfer the knowledge. The tools developed for libraries are now trying to merge with semantic web technology. Both need to express instances with different forms of names. Numerous schemes for different uses of the authorities add complexity to our study. This paper clarifies the situation by drawing up a table with the equivalences between nine standards. It facilitates the decision to choose one and the exportation to other schemes as well. Vestigium web project, a biographic dictionary, tested our results.