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

The purpose of this site is to build a complete, reliable and verifiable database of famous persons, with their birth time.

OGDB currently contains 25 869 persons
24 539 with birth time
1 330 without birth time
Born between 1572 and 1959
From 25 countries
64 birth times are reliable
(related to a birth certificate)
Database statistics
See more database statistics
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
Last additions See Wiki
Checking the coherence of the different
sources of information permitted
to identify potential errors in data.
See Issues
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, almost all data of OGDB are level 5.

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: