Database Reference
In-Depth Information
People by Name
A few services let you look up information from just a name (and possibly a location). These can
be handy when you're trying to integrate a traditional oline data set with no electronic identii-
ers or as a fallback linking online accounts with probable phone and address details.
Based on the most comprehensive online phone book I've found for the US and Canada, the
WhitePages API lets you look up people by name, address, or phone number. There's a limit of
200 queries per day, and the results are returned as XML:
http://api.whitepages.com/find_person/1.0/?\
firstname=mike;lastname=smith;zip=98101;api_key=API_KEYVAL
It's not obvious at irst glance, but you can use the People Search API to ind public proiles for
LinkedIn users, even if they're not irst- or second-degree connections. You'll need to be logged
in through OAuth irst, which will allow you to do an Out of Networksearch:
http://api.linkedin.com/v1/people-search?first-name=[first name]&\
last-name=[last name]&country-code=[country code]&postal-code=[postal code]&\
facets=network&facet=network,O
This will return a set of information from the public proiles of everyone who matches your
search. By default this is a very small set of data (only the users' names and IDs), but you can
ask for more, including full names, companies, job titles, and general locations, using the ield
selector syntax:
http://api.linkedin.com/v1/people-search:
(people:(id,first-name,last-name,profile-url,headline),num-results
A PHP port of
a venerable Perl module
,
itself based on an early '90s awk script, this project
guesses a person's gender from his or her irst name. It's most efective for British and American
people, and it has quite an impressive set of battle-tested special-case algorithms to handle a lot
of variants and nicknames. Nothing like this will be 100 percent accurate, but it's great for ap-
plications like demographic analysis where occasional errors don't matter:
require_once('genderfromname.php');
print gender("Jon"); // prints 'm'
