An open-source research project
The history of America's infrastructure networks, line by line, with the historical citations to prove it.
What it is
The same goes for its power lines, water mains and older roads. Today's datasets show where these networks run, but rarely when each line was built, who owned it, or when it was retired. That history survives in scanned maps in archives and in a century of trade journals that reported each new line as it was laid.
Lineage recovers it as map data that opens in QGIS, the free GIS application researchers already use. Every fact, from a construction date to an owner, carries a citation to the page that says so. The first users are energy researchers studying how US energy distribution grew.
The name is a pun (line + age). It is also the GIS term for the record of a dataset's sources and processing, which is the whole idea.
What the data has to be
How it fits together
There is no master data processing pipeline. Each component reads records in one state and writes the next, and a human review is just a state change. Citation generation is the first priority; everything else can start in parallel.
Components
Finds the page that proves it. Retrieval and assertion happen per attribute, and every citation resolves at the moment the claim is made.
Trade-press ingest from Internet Archive and an authority-ranked search over it, with era-keyed vocabulary: "gas works" in 1887, "pipe line" in 1937.
The network and evidence model, PostGIS, and an audited CRUD API. One model for roads, power, oil, gas and water: segments, junctions, direction and flow.
IIIF image serving, a self-hosted Allmaps editor, and the annotation server it needs. The editor doubles as the georeferencing review tool.
Finding the lines on a georeferenced map, and not the county boundaries and railroads that look just like them. Conservative by design.
Existing hand-made spreadsheets and traces, brought into the model, mess and all. The earliest real test of the data model.
An authenticated app where people accept, correct or reject machine output. No machine-generated claim reaches a release without passing through it.
Versioned, citable builds of the dataset that play as a timeline in QGIS straight out of the box.
House rules
Roadmap
Citations first, file in and file out. The corpus, the data model and API, georeferencing infrastructure, backporting and first vision experiments, all in parallel.
Review for traces and citations, the full backport, and the first release that opens in QGIS.
More network types, a go or no-go on automated tracing, and open-source cleanup.
Members
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Public members of the line-age organization, the same list for every visitor. Membership is private on GitHub by default. Not listed? Make yours public on the organization's People page.