Online Searchable Industry Database

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bigfoot13

Well-Known Member
I recently stumbled upon the https://www.opsig.org/Resources/IndustryDB website. They have a nice list of actual industries that real railroads serviced. I decided to make the text files a little more searchable. You can check it out here https://modelrailroad.network/Industries/

Would love to hear some feedback on this. I'm considering making it into an offline application so you don't have to download the databases every time you open the page.
 
bigfoot13 said:
I recently stumbled upon the https://www.opsig.org/Resources/IndustryDB website. They have a nice list of actual industries that real railroads serviced. I decided to make the text files a little more searchable. You can check it out here https://modelrailroad.network/Industries/

Would love to hear some feedback on this. I'm considering making it into an offline application so you don't have to download the databases every time you open the page.
Click to expand...
I like the option to search railroads for industries in a certain timeframe, so your accurate for the time period and railroad your modelling, great idea.
 
bigfoot13 said:
I recently stumbled upon the https://www.opsig.org/Resources/IndustryDB website. They have a nice list of actual industries that real railroads serviced. I decided to make the text files a little more searchable. You can check it out here https://modelrailroad.network/Industries/

Would love to hear some feedback on this. I'm considering making it into an offline application so you don't have to download the databases every time you open the page.
Click to expand...
This is great! Very helpful indeed. I love the search feature on your site.
 


You are working with non-normalized databases. In other words, it's not really useful for searching by commodity because the commodity names aren't standardized. Searching for "coal" won't turn industries that deal in "anthracite", searching for "machinery" won't give you industries that deal in "machy".

If you really want a good database then you have to go through and put each commodity on a separate record and normalize the commodity names. An industry that deals in " Boilers, machinery, plumbing matl" should be split off into 3 records for the same industry, one with "Boilers", one with "Machinery", one with "Plumbing Materials". Every industry should use the same commodity names. "Machinery", "Machy", "Machry", "machnery" should all be changed to one commodity name "Machinery".

There are also problems searching by year because all the years aren't in the same format.

I did that with one of the OpSig databases and it took me about a year to do one database. Two of those databases are in DHCanada and DHWest on the OpSig site.
 
@dave1905 I agree. The data could be cleaned up. Unfortunately I don't have the time to do that. I was wanting to use there data as is so then I can just update it when they update the file on there website. My hope was to make the information more accessible because then you wouldn't have to import it into a spreadsheet.

@OBTC 1909 Good.

Thank you both for your feedback.
 
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