My current project -- the op-sig database

[taholmes]

Well guys, this is not a model thats on my bench, its a railroad project. I am taking on the project of trying "fix" the op-sig database -- it took some work to get it into access, but now its in, and I am working on trying to normalize the data and get things cleaned up -- Right now the big project is going through the (originally) 10,000+ commodities listed -- putting them in their own table, correcting spelling and getting rid of dupes etc. Heres a funny example -- there were a bunch of listings for "auto" as well as a listing for "atoes" -- it takes some work

after eliminating a bunch of dupes and other stuff, Im on record 799 of 7642 records.

heres a couple screen shots

 

[dave1905]

I did that earlier with one of the Op Sig databases, I believe there are also another effort through the Op Sig to clean up the other databases.
Your screen shots are too small to read so I can't really tell what you are doing. The original Op sig industry database list as many as 6 commodities for each industry. I ran queries to create a separate record for each commodity and then compress it all down to multiple rows for each industry, each with a unique commodity, then normalized the commodity names. There were like 15 names for coal (including abbreviations and misspellings.)

 

[D&J RailRoad]

OP-Sig? Is that like operational signatures, maybe operational signals with commodities? Maybe opposing signals. Not sure. No reference to what OP-sig is.

 

[ianacole]

Operational (or Operations) Special Interest Group

 

[dave1905]

http://www.opsig.org/

Operations Special Interest Group. They are a group of modelers that are interested in all sorts of operations, rules, signals, dispatching methods, car forwarding, etc. etc. The industry database being talked about is a database of thousands of industries all across the US and what they shipped or received.

 

[D&J RailRoad]

Ahhhhh, wasn't even close.
Sounds interesting.

 

[santafewillie]

Sounds interesting.

It is really interesting. I dabbled with it a few years back, but realized that I didn't have time to fully appreciate or help. I would dearly like to get back. I still use one of their industry databases as a basis for "where it came from" on my waybills.

 

[taholmes]

Ya, its a bit of an undertaking, by the time I separated out all the commodities with each company, there are a total of over 70000 records in the db -- right now I am busy trying to clean up all the duplicate and mis-spelled commodity names -- my hope is to get it all cleaned up and normalized in Access and then make it accessable for other products -- we'll see how it works. Right now I cannot build on my layout, so I am glad to have something railroad related

TIM