I’ve been doing some work to Open Correspondence over the last couple of weeks. I started re-parsing the letters to expose some more metadata, mainly placenames and to normalise them.
I’ve finally done the first pass of this update which I’m hoping to make live soon once I’ve updated the controllers and re-checked the other data improvements. Whilst it is not perfect, it is a lot better than it was. I think that the next week will be spent going over the endpoints and the Pylons controllers so that the data is cleaner than at present and correctly linked.
It has been a useful exercise in that I’ve started rewriting the parser for the letters (an ongoing large job I was thinking of doing when I come to the next set of letters) and putting some of the earlier thoughts into place.
Once I’m happy with these updates, I’ll update the site which does mean rebuilding the databases and endpoints. However once it is done, it should be a lot cleaner and I can then start looking at the correspondents and linking into other data sources like dbpedia.org. I think that the first task though might be to restart work on the clients that I had been putting together as a basic development kit.
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