Reconciliation and Matching Framework (RMF)

A framework to allow the configurable matching of string entities using customised sets of transformations and matchers, plus a tool to produce the necessary configurations and another to expose them as OpenRefine reconciliation services.

For more information on what it does, see the Kew Reconciliation Services website.

Credits

This project is developed and maintained by the Biodiversity Informatics team at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Development started in 2012. Contributors in chronological order are:

• Nicky Nicolson (2012- )
• Alecs Geuder (2013-14)
• Matthew Blissett (2014-)

Development and maintenance have been supported by several projects:

• Science and Horticulture Systems project, funded by the UK government (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs). Supported initial development, and a data improvement team (Anna Lynch, Rachel Witherow, Malin Rivers, Eszter Wainwright-Deri).
• Medicinal Plant Names Services project, funded by the Wellcome Trust (technical contributions from Nick Black)
• Plants of the World Online (on-going)

Developer information

Project layout

   ╔════════════════╗ ╔═════════════════════════╗
   ║   Web browser  ║ ║        OpenRefine       ║
   ╚═══╤═════════╤══╝ ╚═════╤╤╤══════════════╤══╝
       │         │          │││              │
       │         │          │││1. Reconcile  │ 2. Extend
       │         │          │││              │
       │         │          │││              │
┏━━━━━━┷━━━━━━━┳━┷━━━━━━━━━━┷┷┷━━━━━━━━┓   ╔═╧══════════════╗
┃  MatchConf   ┃Reconciliation Service ┃   ║Kew MQL services║
┃(Expert users)┃ (Match names to IPNI) ┃   ║    e.g TPL     ║
┣━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┻━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┫   ╚════════════════╝
┃Reconciliation and Matching Framework ┃
┃                Core                  ┃
┣━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┫
┃         String transformers          ┃
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛

Maven submodules:

• rmf-core: previously been referred to as the "Deduplicator" or "Name Matcher". It's a command-line tool for deduplication and string matching tasks.
• matchconf: provides an expert interface for producing custom matching configurations. It provides a UI with persistent configuration functionality. At present there are no active users.
• reconciliation-service is a wrapper around the core, exposing pre-made configurations as OpenRefine reconciliation services. It's best used through OpenRefine, but also presents a web interface for individual queries and bulk CSV upload.
• reconciliation-service-model: domain objects for the reconciliation service.

External pieces shown above:

• The String Transformers library
• MQL services

Testing

mvn clean test

Some tests in the reconciliation-service package connect to databases to check reconciliation results. Passwords need to be supplied on the command line:

mvn clean install -Dipni.database.password=XXX -Dipniflat.database.password=XXX -Dtpl.database.password=XXX

Detailed information

Read in the submodules:

• rmf-core/readme.md
• matchconf/readme.md
• reconciliation-service/readme.md