The NicNames software provides unique identifiers which refer to a single person, regardless of that person being known by multiple names, or multiple people having the same name.

The "Nic" in NicNames comes from "Names In Context" - the reality is that a name alone is not a reliable way of uniquely referring to a particular person.

For each person, the software maintains a small record of information about that person, for disambiguation and de-duplication purposes. The software is capable of automated de-duplication, using advanced intelligent auto-matching algorithms which can determine the likelihood that an identity matches even with incomplete information.

NicNames provides a REST style API allowing external applications to make use of NicNames functionality. This allows external applications, such as institutional repositories, to associate their own records with an identifier from NicNames.