Open Gauquelin Database (OGDB)

Timed birth dates of famous persons

Goals

The purpose is to permit the reproduction of statistical tests on astrology with more complete and reliable data.

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. 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 :

• 1 - Hospital Certificate (HC)
  For births happening in a hospital. Birth date is noted by the medical staff.
  A priori precision of one minute.
• 2 - Birth Certificate (BC)
  Official document attesting the birth. Birth time is declared by the parents or witnesses to the officer.
  Impossible to verify effective birth date. Birth rounded to one hour in France until the 1920s.
• 3 - Birth Record (BR)
  Copy of the BC by an officer.
  Can introduce errors.
• 4 - Other documents
  This level gathers other official documents.
  For example, people born in Paris (France) before 1860 cannot be related to a birth certificate for historical reasons: part of the Paris archives were destroyed in 1871 (events known as "La commune de Paris", some acts and their backups were burnt), and acts prior to 1860 were lost. Reconstituted acts are available online, but they don't contain birth time.
  This level also concerns persons born before the apparition of birth certificates. Some documents only contain birth day (like baptism acts), other also contain birth time (for members of royal families).
• 5 - To check
  Data not related to any official document, like Gauquelin and Müller data, or data found on the web.
  Need to be matched against a BC.

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:

• The transcription from BC to BR.
• Error when copying the BR in their files.
• Error when original paper files where transcribed in an electronic form.
• Errors introduced during file conversions and transformations.
• Bugs in g5 program

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 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. From newalchemypress.com : file 3a_sports.txt, used to restore the group 4384 athletes gathered by Suitbert Ertel. This file is central in the restoration process, as it permits to relate several groups to each other. Build details on tig12.github.io File 5muller_writers.xlsx, used to restore group 1991 Müller 1, 402 Italian writers. Build details on tig12.github.io From personal communication : Scans of Arno Müller Astro-Forschungs-Daten volume 1, 402 Italian writers, containing 100 supplementary writers with birth day but without birth time. A list of 22 writers for which Müller noted a difference with Gauquelin data. Scans downloadable from github.com/tig12/g5-aux Scans of Arno Müller Astro-Forschungs-Daten volume 2, used to build the group 622 famous men. Scans downloadable from github.com/tig12/g5-aux. Scans of Arno Müller Astro-Forschungs-Daten volume 3, used to build the group 234 famous women. Scans downloadable from github.com/tig12/g5-aux.
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.