Schemas

15 April 2024 - 17:22

There are two kinds of schemas within historical demography. IPUMS-USA, IPUMS-International, MOSAIC, and NAPP were developed to standardize census data. IDS, LINKS-gen, and PiCo are efforts to standardize historical data from other types of historical sources, such as the civil registry, militia registers, parish registers, population registers, slave registers, or tax registers. All schemas cater to a very specific public, as they have been developed for projects with strong institutional boundaries.

Census schemas (IPUMS, MOSAIC, NAPP)

There are three schemas to describe census data. The driving force behind processing census data is IPUMS in Minnesota. In 1991, they started providing "common-format extracts" with common codes and constructed variables. In 1999, IPUMS joined up with scholars from Canada, Denmark, Great Britain, Iceland, Norway, Scotland in the North Atlantic Population Project (NAPP). A similar international census comparison project took place in the early 2010s at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock, Germany. The MPIDR schema, called MOSAIC, standardized census data from the 1700s until 1950 for 18 regions in Europe.

Theme	Variables	IPUMS-International	MOSAIC	NAPP
Geography	Country code Place Region Urban-rural status	CNTRY - - URBAN	country place region urban	CNTRY - - URBAN
Household	Group quarter status Household size Household weight	GQ PERSONS WTHH	gq hhsize hhwt	GQ NUMBERHH HHWT
Identifier	Enumeration Household Person	SAMPLE SERIAL PERNUM	id_enum id_hhold id_pers	SAMPLE SERIAL PERNUM
Individual	Age Literacy Marital status Occupational title OCCHISCO Presence at enumeration Relation to household head Religion Sex Weight	AGE LIT MARST - OCCHISCO RESIDENT - RELIG SEX WTPER	age lit marst occupan occhisco presence relate relig sex perwt	AGE LIT MARST OCCSTRN OCCHISCO RESIDENT - RELIGION SEX PERWT
Person Name	First name Last name	- -	fname lname	NAMEFRST NAMELAST
Provenance	-	-	-	-
Quality indicators	Age Household Relation to household head Marital status Sex	- - - - -	qage qhhold qrelate qmarst qsex	QAGEGB - QRELGB QMARSTGB QSEXGB
Source	Enumeration type Enumeration year	- YEAR	enumtype year	- YEAR

Historical person data (IDS, LINKS-gen, PiCo)

IDS, LINKS-gen, and PiCo are efforts to standardize different types of historical person data. Of these schemas, LINKS-gen is by far the most limited and standardized data in two tables that are ready for statistical analysis. IDS has been around since 2009 and explicitly states for which point or period in time historical information is valid. PiCo was developed in 2023 by the Center for Family History in the Netherlands as a means to store information on persons registrations as well as concomitant records and person reconstructions.