The Library of Congress Authorities and Vocabularies service enables both humans and machines to programmatically access authority data at the Library of Congress via URIs.
VIAF is a joint project of the Library of Congress (LC), the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (DNB), the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), and OCLC. The project's goal is to lower the cost and increase the utility of library authority files by matching and linking the authority files of national libraries.