omniseek_resolve_identity
Resolve a person's name to ranked candidate author IDs from OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar, so you can disambiguate homonyms and map co-author relationships.
Instructions
Resolve a PERSON's name to candidate author ids — the shared front door for EVERY relationship layer (you must know WHICH person before you can map their connections).
OmniSeek's other tools keyword-search PAPERS; this resolves an AUTHOR. It NEVER silently
picks — it returns ranked CANDIDATES so YOU disambiguate (the homonym trap: "Zhennan Shen"
is three different people in OpenAlex). hint (e.g. an institution like "HKUST", or a
field) only RE-ORDERS candidates, never filters them. source: "auto" (OpenAlex first,
pulls in Semantic Scholar when the top OpenAlex hit is sparse — i.e. a likely junior /
arXiv-frontier author OpenAlex hasn't indexed), "openalex", or "s2".
paper (an arXiv id / DOI / title of a KNOWN paper by this person) is the reliable way
to pin a COMMON-NAME JUNIOR — it resolves straight from the paper's author list, where a
bare name search fails (e.g. many distinct researchers share a common name like "Wei Zhang";
their paper fixes the exact id).
Use the returned id with omniseek_coauthors. ambiguous: true means two comparable
candidates — confirm with a hint / a paper / a known co-author before trusting either.
likely_same_person (when present) groups same-name same-backend candidates that are likely
ONE person SPLIT across ids, with a ready-to-paste merge_token ("A123+A456") you can hand
straight to omniseek_coauthors as one input; it never auto-merges, just surfaces the candidate merge.
Returns: {query, source, candidates:[{id, source, name, works_count, cited_by,
institution, via_paper?}], ambiguous, note, likely_same_person?:[{source, ids, name,
merge_token, note}], degraded?:{openalex}}. degraded (when present) means the OpenAlex
lookup FAILED (rate-limited / upstream down): an empty/thin result is then missing-data, NOT a
confirmed "not in the graph" — retry, or pass source='s2' / paper=.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| hint | No | ||
| name | Yes | ||
| paper | No | ||
| source | No | auto |