This repository contains miscellaneous data sets which are used to assemble the ait-reference package. It contains general
purpose word lists, control lists, glossaries and abbreviations. It is a new package intended to consolidate into one dedicatєd
location all such reference data from previous incarnations of the AIT framework — in particular, the Dragonfly project,
the Deutsch Bank PBSC factory, and the IBM Tahtum factory. Reference data was scattered in multiple packages and often
redundantly hard coded in compiled software; for instance the command line qotd (quote of the day), where all quotes are
hardcoded in the C binary.
This is work in progress where standardisation efforts still need thought and organisation — See the strategy article where related conclusions are written up. Reuse, maintainability and availability are the KPIs of this strategy.
In addition to consolidating existing reference data, we wish to extend this repository with new datasets providing world facts and figures in various domains — see the roadmap article for the current wishlist. For instance, we have been maintaining over more than a decade, a copy of the CIA's World Factbook; this has primarily been used to create go to market country books. In the future, we would like to transform the exising factbooks into a set of YAML files managed within the scope of this repository.
This is not, and shall not be, a big data junk yard. Information collected here is analysed, sorted and structured by humans. That said, maintaining large sets of structured information requires time and effort. So all helping hands are more than welcome. In return, if YAML is not the lingua franca for such data, we are happy to maintain builds in alternate formats, be they based on markup languages (e.g. JSON, XML, …) or custom binary formats.