User:Econterms/Tracking historical invention: the airplane and its industry

At http://aero.referata.com we have a wiki database containing records about aeronautics and aviation globally up to 1916, during the period when the idea of flying machines transitioned from a dream and a hobby into a new science and a startup industry. Each record includes some structured data and some wikitext. The data include:
 * 14,000 patent records with information on aeronautics-related patent applications in any country up to 1918
 * Hundreds of aeronautical clubs, a place for the social infrastructure of inventing the airplane in the early phase and then a place to try airplanes, afterward
 * Hundreds of new firms in the aircraft business, almost all founded in or after 1908, from 1908-1916
 * A hundred exhibitions, conferences, and prizes for aeronautics and aviation
 * many hundreds of persons who were inventors or authors in the aeronautical and aviation fields
 * Many hundreds of letters between aeronautical experimenters
 * Not yet loaded: over 30,000 bibliographic records of publications about aeronautics from the Bibliography of Aeronautics (1910, 1916, 1921)

These records display reports, e.g. an inventor page can automatically list patents associated with the inventor.

Our research links these records from multiple sources to construct individual and organizational histories and will eventually yield networks of co-authorships and partnerships. One challenge is that we do not have a unified definitive source of purely biographical information, such as birth date or full name. We put these diverse kinds of records on a public wiki so that specialists who are not part of the initial project can improve the underlying data and the matching.