Automatically creating records using ORCIDs, ORCID Public API

We have made a great deal of headway during December regarding linking up our Research Information System (RIS) and the Public ORCID API. The plan is to enable staff to 'claim' academic works that appear in their public ORCID record (see last post for details) for inclusion in our internal RIS. Since September we have enabled our internal HR system to capture ORCIDs from staff, and these are now passing into our RIS where we can start doing things like:

1. Semi-automatically populate staff output records from ORCID data
2. Track collaborations at the individual and institutional level

So far it's been relatively trivial to setup the corresponding connections between our RIS and ORCID. Unfortunately, the data coming back from the API has been a little disappointing, and in particular the structure. Some of the XML formatted information follows a schema of sorts, and some does not. Where it does it makes it easy to ingest and create associated records at our end. Where it does not we are essentially tasked with making sense of 'free text', where author, title, publication data can often be mixed up together as one string without any obvious method of delimiting the constituent parts.

I hope to chat through the issue of free text with the UK based ORCID developer at the next ORCID pilot meeting in January to see what options we have moving forward.