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I'm looking for a dataset of personal names containing for each name as many following labels as possible:

  • first name(s)
  • middle name if any
  • last name(s)
  • nationality
  • country of residence
  • country of birth
  • age
  • sex
  • is married
  • number of siblings
  • number of children
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  • if you can deal with 72-year old data, i think you just want census data Commented Mar 27, 2014 at 23:48
  • Just for China, or did you want data for the whole world in every language? Commented Mar 30, 2014 at 4:24
  • I don't know that it'd get you any more than the first couple of fields, but you might look to the bibliometrics community for the names portion of it. They might indirectly have country of residence for academics (inferred by their employeer affiliations). Of course, depending on why you need this, it might introduce bias being from academia.
    – Joe
    Commented Mar 31, 2014 at 1:52
  • I just had another thought -- IMDB. I don't know if they have that info in a structured way, but you might be able to parse some of it out of the bio (country of birth, nationality, marriages, children, siblings ... although they might be inconclusive (eg, lack of a listed marriage doesn't mean unmarried)) ... but the license says 'personal and non-commercial use'. See imdb.com/interfaces
    – Joe
    Commented Mar 31, 2014 at 1:59
  • Great suggestion @Joe! I expanded on your comment below. I hope it's helpful.
    – philshem
    Commented Mar 31, 2014 at 12:56

3 Answers 3

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I'm going to expand on the comment of @Joe above because there isn't room to add too much in the comments.

IMDB offers textfile datasets with enormous amounts of data (details). Choosing one site at random, you see a list of the files (link). Choose biographies.list.gz and uncompress. The biographies.list file has sections incuding:

NM: 'K', Murray the

RN: Murray Kaufman

NK: The Fifth Beatle

DB: 14 February 1922, New York City, New York, USA

DD: 21 February 1982, Los Angeles, California, USA (cancer)

BG: Murray the K was born Murray Kaufman in New York, New York, on 14... (abbreviated)

SP: * 'Jacklyn Zeman' (qv) (14 February 1979 - 1981) (divorced)

TR: * Legendary disk jockey who made his name at WINS (New York) in the 1950s... (abbreviated)

Some categories are easy to decode (BG = background). Here is the full list of possible categories, with some annotation based on my skimming. It seems there are about 500k unique people included. The data is a little dirty, but you can surely get names, nationalities, countries, ages, genders, marital and family status after a little text mining.

2050717 BG: (biography)

1438983 TR: (trivia)

585662 NM: (name)

560287 OW:

373177 DB: (date of birth)

329587 QU: (quotes)

155847 HT: (height)

138481 RN: (real name)

132678 AT:

130380 SP: (spouse)

119293 DD: (date of death)

96901 BY: (biography written by)

74378 CV:

66683 NK: (nickname)

61704 PT:

52134 IT:

29016 BO:

27863 TM:

11012 PI:

6348 SA:

6042 BT:

1 WN:

Overview stats via some awk/grep/sort/uniq/sort:

awk '{print $1}' biographies.list | grep -v '^$' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn -k1

Update: Instead of downloading the file and parsing it, you can use one of the unofficial APIs: discussion.

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There's a sample generation project on GEDIS Studio (online generation tool) named "Personal Data" allowing to generate those data. You can register a free account from www.data-generator.com.

Provided fields for each record : Country Code, UID, Family headcount, gender, first name, last name, birth date, age, majority (yes/no), marital status, address, email, job title, bank data.

You can configure many parameters controlling the quality of generated data such has : Country Code (French, US, UAE), Male / Female ratio, Ratio Family (single / multi), Married Ratio, Age of Majority, Age distribution,...

More info on GEDIS Studio at http://www.gedis-studio.com/personal-data.html

You will find there two sample datasets (each of 300 records) and detail descriptions on the configuration of generation.

Notice that this generator is configurable and you can change / add / remove whatever you want I soon as you imported it into your workspace.

Disclaimer : I'm the owner of GEDIS Studio, so you can ask me improvement :)

5

Yo could scrape baby names from the Social Security site http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/

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