wri / global-power-plant-database

A comprehensive, global, open source database of power plants
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Add indicator field for common variants/alternatives of a power plant's name #8

Open colinmccormick opened 6 years ago

colinmccormick commented 6 years ago

Description

Many power plants are referred to by multiple names. Some reasons for this are (1) a plant was renamed, (2) a plant has both formal and informal names in common use, (3) a plant's name sometimes includes the owner company and/or fuel type and sometimes does not, and (4) different abbreviations or Romanizations are used for the plant name. Tracking the most common variants of a plant's name will help with cross-referencing this data set to others, and other data matching needs.

Possible Steps

Add an indicator that is a list of name variations or alternative names used to refer to each power plant.

Possible Data Sources

As information becomes available through manual confirmation or automatic matching of records, new alternative names can be added.

Challenges

Many potential variations on a name are possible, given abbreviations, etc. We can't track all of them. Need to maintain a robust but limited list.

Additional Info

keywords: identity, identifiers, cross reference, name, names, aliases,