Published in iPhylo
Author Roderic Page
![](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-qCLlGqdFDu0/Vcg0dh8JUuI/AAAAAAAAEAI/Gd1cYKILyVM/s72-c/220px-Boulenger_George_1858-1937.png?imgmax=800)
One of the less glamorous but necessary tasks of data cleaning is mapping "strings to things", that is, taking strings such as "George A. Boulenger" and mapping them to identifiers, such as ISNI: 0000 0001 0888 841X. In case of authors such as George Boulenger, one way to do this would be through Wikipedia, which has entries for many scientists, often linked to identifiers for those people (see the bottom of the Wikipedia page for George A.