Hello,

Over the last few weeks, I have assembled a list of (mostly professional) go players, some basic biographical information (date of birth/death, rank progression) and of different spellings of their names in different languages. Currently it contains around 2700 players.

Take a look!

There are several reasons why I think this list will be useful:

• When using Kombilo with games from several SGF collections, it is currently difficult to search for all games of some player, because her/his name might be spelled differently (e.g., Yi Se-tol versus Lee Sedol)
• It can eventually also serve to translate/transscribe player names into languages other than English (e.g., for many players' names, the list already has the Chinese version, coming from https://goratings.org/, and the Russian version, coming from https://wikidata.org/)
• Using this information, it is much easier to compare different SGF collections and search for inconsistencies (e.g., the same game occurring in several databases where the black/white players are mixed up or are entirely different).

The data is openly available (CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication), and I hope that others will have more ideas how to put it to good use. You can download the data in JSON format. There is also a "REST API" to access that data.

Feedback and contributions are welcome! There are probably quite a few errors in the data (erroneous spellings, wrong dates, mixed up names, ...), and definitively many pieces of information could be added on top of what I have so far.

Thanks are due to Andries Brouwer, Rémi Coulom, John Fairbairn and Mace Lee for useful suggestions and/or permission to use data from their projects.


Best regards, Ulrich

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u-go.net

This is great. Good work, thanks!