Everything that is described in the Railway History Database has a document assigned to it which collects all that is known about it. The things—or entities—described range from concrete things such as railway lines, stations, and companies, to more abstract descriptions such as the geometrical description of the route a line takes.
Each document consists of a mapping. Each document has a key, which is used to uniquely identify the document, and a type, which specificies the kind of entity and with it which attributes are allowed in the mapping and what they mean.
The key document attribute contains the key of a document,
a string uniquely identifying that document. A document’s
must only consist of Unicode letters, digits, the hyphen-minus -, and the
full stop ..
The full stop is used to break the key into parts and introducing a
hierarchy into document keys. The document type is repeated, for some types
in abbreviated form, as the first part of the key, followed by a part
consisting of the two-letter country code for the country the document
relates to or int if the document relates to multiple countries, followed
by additional parts describing the document within the country or the global
space.
The type document attribute specifies the type of the document. It is an
enum with one value defined for each known document type. See the
description of the various types for their assigned value.
The progress document attribute specifies how far adding of data for this
document has progressed. It’s value is an enum with one of the following
values.
stub-
The line has been added but no or only very limited data has been collected yet. This most often happens if the document needs to be referenced by other documents. While their are no hard-fast rule exist for when a document of a specific type progresses beyond a stub, some hints are given with each type.
in-progress-
Enough data has been added to lift the document beyond stub state but there is still work to do.
complete-
The data for the document is considered complete at the time of last edit. Naturally, there may always surface information that has not yet been added. As such, this value is to be treated with a grain of salt.
The progress attribute is optional. If it is missing, a value of
in-progress is assumed.