Hello World ! / Bonjour !
I’m an early community member from 2018, but first time posting in the forum !
First, i’d like to know if there are any French members around, french channels or meetup clubs to be join? If not, maybe we should start one 
I wouldn’t call myself a developer as i have a very basic level of coding in Python. But as i’m going through the Courses over the ICP association website, Moritz pointed me to the SDK examples as the courses seems to be for more experienced Motoko users.
Starting from scratch, where should i go first?
My day job is Librarian, i’ve been at it for the past 17 years, and i’m now in charge of our 6 libraries network database. We use a Library management software whose DB are hosted in servers such as OVH and so are completely dependant on AWS. That’s the 1st issue. When those services are down, or when those OVH servers burned 2 months ago : we can’t work.
At All. I Can’t lend documents, can’t send requests…the usual sh*t show
The 2nd issue i bump into, is the main one (i’m gonna try to explain it the best i can with my poor english)
When i receive a new CD or book at the library, i have to register that document into our database. There are multiple fields i have to fill: EAN, ISBN, number of pages, number of tracks, their artists IDs such as name, surname etc, also their functions: is she a writer? a director? an actor? does she play violin? piano? Sometimes i fill all the fields by myself, sometimes i import the document ID with some fields already filled by my document provider.
There are numerous possibilities and thank you, we are all using common abbreviations, standards that are shared all around the world: Dewey classification for example.
Unfortunately, there are limits here : anyone in our local network can “create” a new entry in the catalog. Let’s say Robert de Niro. The proper way to add him would be
$a De Niro
$b Robert
If the database if malfunctioning someday (server issue, slow connection), maybe that entry won’t pop up and the user will think that De Niro has no entry. So he will create one. That’s a duplicate.
There is an international ID for De Niro, shared by numerous libraries called ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier)
It’s an identifier system for uniquely identifying the public identities of contributors to media content such as books, television programmes, and newspaper articles. Such an identifier consists of 16 digits. It can optionally be displayed as divided into four blocks.
It exists but it is not used by everyone. So Library X might have a Robert de Niro X & Library Z might have a Robert de Niro Z. But no Robert de Niro ISNI to be interrogated to avoid duplicates. Sometimes I even found entries with 4 or 7 copies of the same identities in my DB
You see where i’m going here. And i wants to bring the debate far beyond:
I have to clean my database all the time : duplicate of authors, labels, editors…
Nothing makes sense, it’s not efficient. Nothing can be shared. You can’t migrate multiple databases into one and look for duplicates cause you have no point of reference…
De Niro, Robert
DeNiro, Robert
De Niro Robert
Deniro, Robertt
etc etc etc
All those have different ids in my software. And you could go on & on & on like this, creating even more entries with different spelling, a comma there, a capital H here, surname in capital, one with date of birth one without…They could ALL have the correct ISNI attached to it, very practical if you wanted to bring content from IMDB or National library to your webpage etc but totally useless at the end…
So how can we fix this (i know right? now you’re like, sorry man it’s your mess)
How could we have a single entry for public identities that is fully decentralized, verified and can be shared/used by everyone? There’s only one Robert de Niro. Yet, all libraries, merchants across the world uses as many ids as software they use…as many duplicates as flaws…
I started to think about how IPFS could be a solution, or some other blockchain projects.
But hey, DFINITY is what i’m most excited about since day one and if there is an internet computer going on, we should make this right.
I’m just a middle man here but the company i pay for, hosting my database is fully centralized, information i add to their servers is not their property yet it spreads truth wrongly, its not efficient.
Discogs for example, is the biggest music database, and still, i encounter this kind of issues with it : anyone can create a duplicate, using a capital letter somewhere and so on. There are no crossing with ISNI on Discogs…Discogs & National libraries are not working together ! It’s a non-sense! Discogs itself is totally useless if their servers crash, right?
So why don’t we have a single united DB for verified contributors that is fully decentralized ?
Why don’t national libraries, blockchain for good & Integrated Library system / Library management system, the record shop i buy music from etc etc work together on those issues? Knowledge is a common good after all.
Well… I think it’s enough for a first post 
I’d love to unite all those actors i mentionned earlier in a vast project that yes could take years but for the common good would be fantastic…build on ? 
