Twelve Tools and Applications Related to the GND – An Open Collection of Profiles

The Gemeinsame Normdatei (GND, Germany’s Integrated Authority File) was at the center of the GND Forum Humanities@NFDI, held on 23 and 24 June 2026 in Göttingen. There, the four humanities and cultural studies NFDI consortia, NFDI4Culture, NFDI4Memory, NFDI4Objects, and Text+, together with the GND office at the German National Library (DNB), presented twelve tools and applications related to the GND in the form of concise profiles.

Each profile answers four guiding questions, namely What is the tool good for? What can you do with it? How do you get access? What should you keep in mind?, and assigns the application to one of four categories: Cataloging, Enrichment, Retrieval, or Mapping.

The twelve tools and applications presented are:

  1. R:hovono (Mapping): A vocabulary and recommendation system for humanities research communities, accessible via FactGrid.
  2. GND Documentation (Cataloging): The German National Library’s rulebook for recording and maintaining GND authority records.
  3. Federated Content Search (FCS) (Retrieval): Content-based full-text search across distributed data holdings in the Text+ data space.
  4. The GND Editor for Musical Works in RISM (Mapping): Creation and validation of GND work authority records for musical works directly in the RISM editor.
  5. GND Reconciliation Service (Mapping): An open-source interface that automatically matches entity strings against GND records.
  6. entityXML (Cataloging): The exchange format of the Text+ GND agency for structured capture and submission of entity data.
  7. DANTE (Mapping): A vocabulary service for building, importing, and structuring custom controlled vocabularies.
  8. GNDplus (Enrichment): A participatory, complementary data space for project-specific entities and candidate records.
  9. Text+ Registry (Retrieval): A central overview of resources, collections, and offerings in the GND/Text+ environment.
  10. FactGrid (Enrichment): A Wikibase database for historians used to model and publish research data.
  11. Fluffy Publication Workflow (Enrichment): A publication workflow via the TextGrid Repository with metadata enrichment through the GND.
  12. Constrainify (Mapping): A web application for defining data quality rules and checking datasets, including GND URIs, for conformance.

The full collection of profiles, with contact details, screenshots, and further links for every tool, is available in its entirety under CC0 (individual components may be subject to copyright).

For the complete account of the GND Forum Humanities@NFDI 2026, including the discussions on GND entity types and the joint position paper on the future of collaboration, see Barbara Fischer’s blog post.