[aprssig] APRS device identifiers (tocalls) in YAML, XML and JSON

Heikki Hannikainen hessu at hes.iki.fi
Wed Oct 23 17:23:58 EDT 2013


Tonight i started the effort of publishing a machine-readable APRS
device/software identification database. This is basically tocalls.txt
in a format that can be used by software without another manual
conversion job from Bob's text format. It also contains aprsd's
identification which is not present in tocalls.txt.

https://github.com/hessu/aprs-deviceid

The master copy is in YAML, which I personally prefer for editing by
hand using my favourite ASCII text editor. The format is suitable for
configuration files and such, and allows #comments.

https://github.com/hessu/aprs-deviceid/blob/master/tocalls.yaml

Then there's a validator script which calls a YAML parser and then
checks the contents a bit (makes sure mandatory keys are present, and
non-mandatory keys are in the supported set). Should prevent most of
the stupid editing mistakes.

The validator then produces XML and JSON files which are easy to read
in most programming languages (if you don't wish to bring in a YAML
parser library).

Pretty-printed JSON (with some newlines and whitespace):
https://github.com/hessu/aprs-deviceid/blob/master/generated/tocalls.pretty.json

Dense JSON (no whitespace for readability):
https://github.com/hessu/aprs-deviceid/blob/master/generated/tocalls.dense.json

Dense XML (feedback on schema is welcome):
https://github.com/hessu/aprs-deviceid/blob/master/generated/tocalls.xml

Documentation in the README file:
https://github.com/hessu/aprs-deviceid/blob/master/README.md

Click on the "Raw" button to find a link to the raw files.

Mic-E identifiers are still missing. I'll add it, and then make the
Ham::APRS::DeviceID use this database.

Note that I didn't actually use this version of the database for
anything yet, I just put it together tonight. There are probably some
errors in the contents.

- Hessu



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