NYC Space/Time Directory - Architecture

This diagram shows the architecture of NYPL’s NYC Space/Time Directory project — it shows how tools and components work together, and how they share data. Parts of the NYC Space/Time Directory are based on Histograph, a search engine for historical place names built by Waag Society.

Click on any of the project’s components to open it’s GitHub README file. The project’s Documentation repository on GitHub provides more details about the dependencies of various components of the project.

Datasets & their Dependencies

NYC Space/Time Directory’s Orchestrator runs all ETL modules in the right order, and takes their dependencies into account. For example, to create a dataset of historical addresses (e.g. 23½ Myrtle Avenue), the ETL module etl-addresses combines the locations of historical house numbers with a list of NYC’s streets. For more information about this process, see our tutorial on historical addresses.

This architecture diagram itself can be found on GitHub, too. And it’s easy to make a similar diagram for your own project!