People

A database of persons included in Office of the Historian publications and datasets. The application provides a searchable list of all entries and an OpenRefine Reconciliation Service.

Data sources

• The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series (see raw data at the HistoryAtState/frus GitHub repository)
• Visits to the United States by Foreign Leaders and Heads of State (see raw data at the HistoryAtState/visits GitHub repository)
• Principal Officers and Chiefs of Mission of the U.S. Department of State (see raw data at the HistoryAtState/pocom GitHub repository)
• Presidents of the United States

Status

The data and app are in early beta. Caveat: Data identifiers are subject to change.

Dependencies

• The data in the data collection is XML
• The application runs in eXist-db. Requires 3.0RC2.
• Building the installable package requires Apache Ant
• The OpenRefine Reconciliation Service targets OpenRefine 2.6 Beta

Installation

• Check out the repository

• Build xar file(s) with command:

  1. Single xar file: The collection.xconf will only contain the index, not any triggers!

     ant

• Upload build/people-0.1.xar to eXist-db's Dashboard > Package Manager

• Open http://localhost:8080/exist/apps/people

• The OpenRefine Reconciliation Service endpoint is at http://localhost:8080/exist/apps/people/reconcile

URL structure

• Individual records are stored in /people/id/{PERSON_IDENTIFIER}, where {PERSON_IDENTIFIER} is a numerical ID.
• The default view is HTML.
• The source XML data for a record can be viewed by appending .xml to the URL, i.e., /people/id/{PERSON_IDENTIFIER}.xml

Data size and organization

The initial size of the dataset is ~16,000 person records. Each person record is assigned a numerical ID. In the mid-to-long term, data will approach and eventually exceed 100,000 records.

The numerical IDs assigned to person records begin with 100,001. (Starting with 100,001 instead of 1 helps with sorting in integer-ignorant environments, which treat 10 as coming before 2.)

For performance considerations in our environments (git, filesystem, and eXist-db database), we limit the number of files in a directory to 100. To facilitate this, we use a directory structure as follows:

Record 100001 is stored in: 100000/1/0/0/0. This directory contains 100001.xml through 100099.xml.

Record 113400 is stored in: 100000/1/1/3/4. This directory contains 113400.xml through 113499.xml.