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Open Gauquelin Database (OGDB)
Timed birth dates of famous persons

OGDB currently contains 25 871 persons
24 541 with birth time
1 330 without birth time
Born between 1572 and 1959
From 25 countries
74 birth times are reliable
(related to a birth certificate)
Database statistics
See more database statistics
Last additions See Wiki
Other data
OGDB also provides downloads to data
not included in the database
but usable for astro-stat research
(in particular data from Didier Castille).
See Other data
Checking the coherence of the different
sources of information permitted
to identify potential errors in data.
See Issues
The purpose of this site is to build a complete, reliable and verifiable database of famous persons,
with their birth time.
The initial version of the database contains the data used to perform statistical tests on astrology, between 1955 and 1996 (see historical data).
These data were gathered by Michel and Françoise Gauquelin, Arno Müller, Suitbert Ertel and 3 groups of skeptics: Comité Para - Belgium 1976, CSICOP - U.S. 1979, CFEPP - France 1996.
The program used to build the initial database is called gauquelin5 (or g5). See page "About" for more details.

Goals

The purpose is to permit the reproduction of statistical tests on astrology with more complete and reliable data.
Main steps of this project are described in the home page of g5 documentation:
  1. Gather the historical data and merge them in a single database.
  2. Check and correct them.
  3. Connect the historical data to standard datasets like wikidata and complete birth times to build larger groups.
  4. Build new eminence indicators and sort famous persons by eminence rank.

Wiki

Step 1 of the project (create a database containing historical data) is almost completed, and the current purpose is to check, correct and complete the database.
The database includes a mechanism to associate the persons with their birth certificates - see opengauquelin.org/wiki.
Checking thousands of birth dates is a big task, but it's much easier than at Gauquelins' epoch. In some countries, birth certificates are directly available online.

Open data

Open data is a necessity to produce data usable for science.
Scientific works need to be verifiable and reproductible. Users should have the possibility to download the data on their machines, and do what they want with them.
So data contained in this site are released under a Creative Commons license. See page About for details.
Free software (open source)
Open data could be generated by proprietary (closed) software, because the important thing is data.
But the choice of opengauquelin.org is to use only free software, which permits easier verification and debug.

Data reliability

The data contained in OGDB integrate many corrections, so data are more reliable than the sources it uses.
But one must be aware that OGDB cannot be considered as reliable. It probably still contains many errors and the only way to be sure of the data is to check each birth date one by one, comparing the values stored in the database with the values written in the civil registries.
Merging data used in historical tests permitted to identify potential errors, listed on page issues

Trust level

Trust level is indicating data reliability.
Five levels were defined in OGDB : Most births that occured in the 19th and early 20th century do not have Hospital Certificate.
So the best we can hope for OGDB is to reach level 2.
Currently, most of OGDB persons are level 5 - a small but growing number of persons are level 2.

Remark : Françoise and Michel Gauquelin, Arno Müller and the three groups of skeptics were apparently taking a lot of care to avoid errors. But in practice, they didn't have access to Birth Certificates: they were writing to the town halls ; an officer was copying the information contained in the BC and sending them back a letter. They were only recieving Birth Records (level 3).

So all Gauquelin and related data are considered level 5 because of error sources:

Credits

Credits for the historical part of the database should of course go first to the original authors : Michel and Françoise Gauquelin, Arno Müller, Suitbert Ertel and the three groups of skeptics (Comité Para, CSICOP, CFEPP).
The reconstitution of the historical data sets would'nt have been possible without the help of the persons listed below.
A big thanks to all of them.
Patrice Guinard Author of cura.free.fr, Patrice Guinard didn't contribute directly to opengauquelin, but the database benefited from the consequent amount of work which was needed to publish the data on cura.free.fr : Françoise Gauquelin gave to Patrice Guinard the data published by the Gauquelin laboratory LERRCP, asking him to put them available online. This involved months of work and regular updates over the years which provided a good departure point to build opengauquelin. 21 469 persons coming from cura.free.fr were used to build the groups A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, A6, D6, D10, E1 and E3, representing 87 % of the timed historical data (The Gauquelins are by far the most important data collectors).
Opengauquelin uses version 5 of the data (link on archive.org). A version 6 was published in november 2020 but the database became a paid service, not usable by opengauquelin because not open.
Nick Kollerstrom Author of newalchemypress.com, Nick Kollerstrom provided most of the missing data to complete historical tests.
Special thanks for his questions, remarks, explanations and enthousiasm, which has motivated the development of opengauquelin since 2019.
Kenneth Irving Kenneth Irving sent the file which permitted to include the CSICOP test in the database. And gave the authorization to publish it as open data.
Without his help, the restoration of this group wouldn't have been possible (the only known published list, in The Skeptical Inquier vol. 4.2 is almost impossile to use).
Jan Wilhem Nienhuys Jan Willem Nienhuys indicates in one of his articles, "The Mars Effect in Retrospect", that data concerning the CFEPPP test can be obtained upon request. He sent several files and gave the authorization to use one of them for inclusion in opengauquelin.
Graham Douglas Graham Douglas sent a file containing the data he recieved from Christian Ertel (Suibert Ertel's son) with the authorization to re-use it.
This file is not yet included in the database.
Thierry Graff Author of opengauquelin.org, Thierry Graff scanned and OCRed the lists published in "Les hommes et les astres", the first book by Michel Gauquelin book in 1955.