Adding to the Toolbox: Creating and Maintaining a Searchable Database of Events

1. Adding to the Toolbox: Creating and Maintaining a Searchable Database of Events Tim Mullen Federal Reserve Board

2. Background • “The Green Notebook”: notes and news clippings from 1948-1975. Early years only have 10-20 entries per year. There are a few attempts to do a chronology of monetary policy that also covers international policy. Entry examples: • Jul. 15, 1959 - Nationwide steel strike of 116 days. Involved 519,000 employees. Estimated loss of 41,900,000 man-days • May 10, 1971 - Exchange Market Crisis. Bonn government floated the Mark. • Aug. 11, 1972 - The United States ended its Vietnam ground combat role. • Feb. 12, 1973 – US government announced 10 percent devaluation of the dollar. • Dec. 13-14, 1973 – Truckers protest fuel crisis in two day strike. • Idea (circa 1998): We should type these up to have electronically • Idea (circa 2001): We should create a web page. • Idea (circa 2004): We should put these in a database. • Idea (circa 2007): We should graph these.

3. Manually adding events to charts

4. A common way of displaying events

5. Using a timeline to display events

6. Adding filtering to a timeline

7. What can we do to visualize events? • Located open source event charting software. • Found easily incorporated seed data for events. • Wrote connector for FAME databases

12. The next step—maintaining the database: • How do we add new events? • What are the metadata requirements? • How do we categorize events? • How do we find events? • Flagging events for review and consistency

13. How do we add new events? • What constitutes an event? • Almost anything; relaxed criteria in early stages of populating database • Need verifiable source (website, book, paper, expert, etc.) • Trust users to know what events are relevant • Who adds events? • Database administrator(s) • Full read/write access • Users • Restrictions on write access to database • After set number of submissions, grant admin privileges

14. What are the Metadata requirements? • Event subject/main title • Event date – start/end • Location – event and impact? • Information source • Author of event entry (for follow up questions) • Categorization for filtering • Distribution restrictions • Reviewed, but not currently using, existing metadata structures

15. How do we categorize events? • By type – fixed, high-level list • Economic, Financial, Political, Natural, Social • By category – allow choice of known taxonomies • Journal of Economic Literature Classification • Pros: well known and organized • Cons: focus on economics, lack of structure for social, political, natural events • North American Industry Classification System • Pros: well known and widely used • Cons: International events, changes every 5 years, industry only

16. How do we categorize events (2)? • Fed in Print Subject headings • Pros: known to our users, covers wide variety of topics outside of economics • Cons: not used outside of Fed. Res. system, too granular • Example of subjects starting with letter “G”:

17. How do we find and report events? • Text based search • Search title • Search body • Filtering by: • Date, type, category, keyword • Browse all events • Each event links to page with: • Body and all metadata • Reporting form which will flag event for follow-up

18. Future plans: • Finalize submission form guidelines • Finalize categorization choice set • Create application to export events • Higher frequency time display • Incorporate use of vintage data

19. Last slide…. I would greatly appreciate your comments and suggestions. Please feel free to call or email: Tim Mullen Timothy.A.Mullen@frb.gov (202) 452-3898