Angela Lumezeanu

Insights into Designing and Building a Historical Population Database

Angela Lumezeanu

Article information

Abstract

The study presents some of the issues involved in designing and building a historical database, namely the Historical Population Database of Transylvania (HPDT). Devising the architecture of a source-oriented database is always a challenging task. Working with historical, complex sources with heterogeneous information, written in different languages, meant a continuous adaptation of the database that had several development versions, being presently at the starting point of its fourth version. HPDT was developed to have a research component with multiple databases (a source database, a standard one, and a linked table of individuals), as well as a public component.

Keywords: Transylvania, historical population database, HPDT, standardization, Record Linkage

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