DBLP FAQ: Person records / One mebi record

Since May 15, 2008 DBLP contains more than 2²⁰ = 1,048,576 records (including "person records").

Since June 12, 2008 DBLP lists more than 2²⁰ publications. Additionally there are > 12000 "person records".

What are person records?

For some DBLP authors we have stored supplemental information. For example, if you visit the DBLP page of Stephan Diehl, you may find a link to his "Home Page" above his list of publications known to DBLP. In the huge XML file (available from http://dblp.uni-trier.de/xml/dblp.xml[.gz]) this information is contained in the record

<www key="homepages/d/StephanDiehl">
<author>Stephan Diehl</author>
<title>Home Page</title>
<url>http://www.st.uni-trier.de/~diehl/</url>
</www>

Person records were added to DBLP, when we were not able to upgrade the DTD corresponding to our XML file without crashing software of other groups in a project we participated in. Therefore we used a strange convention: Person records always have the key-prefix "homepages", the record level tag is always "www", and they always contain a title field with the contents "Home Page". The author field is used to identify the person, the url field contains the address of the home page.

Sometimes people change their name, or people are known by several names. For example look at Margaret H. Dunham, Alon Y. Halevy, C. J. van Rijsbergen, Anastasia Ailamaki, ... In the XML record we simple enumerate the name variations. The first one is called the "primary name", because we map / redirect all other (secondary) name variations to this one.

<www key="homepages/r/CJvanRijsbergen">
<author>C. J. van Rijsbergen</author>
<author>Cornelis Joost van Rijsbergen</author>
<author>Keith van Rijsbergen</author>
<title>Home Page</title>
<url>http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~keith/</url>
</www>

To identify people, it may be helpful to store addional information like their affiliation or their name in an alternative writing system. In person records, there is an optional "note" field. The contents of this field is printed out at the heading of the corresponding DBLP person page. Look at Chen Li or Atsuyuki Morishima.

<www key="homepages/l/ChenLi">
<author>Chen Li</author>
<title>Home Page</title>
<url>http://www.ics.uci.edu/~chenli/</url>
<note>Irvine, CA, USA</note>
</www>

Currently the note field of person records is the only place where DBLP extends above the "Latin-1" character set:

<www key="homepages/m/AtsuyukiMorishima">
<author>Atsuyuki Morishima</author>
<title>Home Page</title>
<url>http://www.kc.tsukuba.ac.jp/~mori/index.html</url>
<note>森嶋厚行</note>
</www>

Why "mebi"?

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