Collection internals

cartolex.collect brings people, organisations and texts into a project. This page describes its machinery: the HTTP layer every finder goes through, the source writers that turn what was collected into the tables of Sources: the data model, and the demo services that let everything run offline. The user’s view is in Collecting people and texts, and what leaves the computer in Privacy and personal data.

Layering

cartolex.collect imports the project format (cartolex.project), the packaged data and two engine helpers (PDF text, language detection); nothing else of cartolex. The engine never imports it. The demo world and its fake services are for tests only: collection never imports them and they never import collection (tests/test_layering.py). Settings are passed in; nothing reads an environment variable below the command line.

The HTTP layer

One HttpClient per collection job sends every request:

from cartolex.collect import CollectSettings, HttpClient

client = HttpClient(
    CollectSettings(contact="me@example.org", api_keys={"openalex": key}),
    cache_dir=project.layout.cache_http,
    mode="normal",                      # or "refresh", "cache_only"
    progress=lambda fraction, message: ...,
    cancel=lambda: stop_event.is_set(),
)
page = client.get_json("openalex", "authors", {"search": name},
                       kind="person_search", sends=["name"])
works = client.get_all("openalex", "works", {"filter": ..., "per_page": 100},
                       kind="works_by_author", sends=["identifier"], paging=OPENALEX_PAGING)

concern	rule
pacing	a token bucket per (service, host), from the service’s declared RateLimit; CollectSettings.rates overrides it (the demo services use no pacing)
timeouts	Timeouts(connect, read), finite and positive, passed on every request; None or infinity is refused when the settings are made
retries	429, 500, 502, 503, 504, timeouts, cut connections and unreadable bodies are retried with exponential backoff and jitter (RetryPolicy: 5 attempts, 1 s doubling, capped at 60 s, each wait drawn between half and all of it); Retry-After (seconds or an HTTP date) is waited at least; a Retry-After beyond max_retry_after (300 s) stops the job at once
errors	ServiceUnavailable (retries exhausted), NotFound (404, not retried), RequestRefused (another 4xx, not retried), MalformedResponse, IncompleteResults, CacheMiss, Cancelled; each ServiceError names the host, the status and what to do
pages	get_all follows a cursor until the service gives none or an empty page; the items must add up to the count the first page announced, else IncompleteResults: a page cut short never gives a short list
unannounced counts	for a list that announces no count (SciELO’s offset paging), CursorPaging(confirm_empty=True) asks an empty page once more before taking the list as complete
bytes	get_bytes reads an answer that is not JSON (XML, a PDF, an archive), from a path or a whole http(s) link a service gave, with the same pacing, retries, cache (<key>.bin.gz, cartolex-http-cache-bytes/1) and modes; its validate receives the bytes, so a cut file is retried, never cached
cancel	cancel() is asked before every request and during every wait (waits are cut in steps of a quarter second); Cancelled leaves the cache consistent
progress	client.progress(fraction, message) never goes backwards; long waits report why
egress	client.egress counts requests per (service, host) and the kinds of data sent (name, identifier, DOI, institution name, contact address, API key), never the values
secrets	the OpenAlex key goes in an Authorization: Bearer header; api_key, mailto and other secret parameters never enter a cache key or a cache file

The cache

Answers live in cache/http/<service>/<xx>/<key>.json.gz, one gzip-compressed JSON entry each (cartolex-http-cache/1: service, kind, method, canonical URL, parameters, status, the headers kept, retrieval time, body), written atomically. The key is the SHA-256 of the method, the canonical URL (lower-case scheme and host, no default port, no trailing slash) and the sorted parameters that change the answer. A service on this computer (the demo services) has the host loopback whatever its port, so its answers survive a restart on another port; the demo services put the world they serve in the first segment of their URLs, so answers of one demo world are never taken for another’s. A paged list is cached whole, once complete, under its own key; its pages are not cached one by one, so a cancelled list leaves nothing partial.

Freshness is decided when an entry is read, from its retrieval time and the lifetime of its kind of request, so a new lifetime applies to entries already stored:

service	kind	lifetime
OpenAlex	person_search	3 days
OpenAlex	authors_by_orcid, works_by_author	7 days
OpenAlex	author	14 days
OpenAlex	institution_search, institution, institution_units	30 days
OpenAlex	works_by_institution	7 days
OpenAlex	works_by_doi	90 days
ORCID	registry_works	7 days
ORCID	registry_record	30 days
HAL	hal_name_search	3 days
HAL	hal_works	7 days
HAL	hal_structures, hal_record	30 days
HAL	hal_file	90 days
SciELO	scielo_identifiers	1 day
SciELO	scielo_article	30 days
SciELO	scielo_fulltext	90 days
arXiv, bioRxiv/medRxiv, Europe PMC	every kind	30 days
open-access copies (files)	oa_file	90 days

Failures are never cached (a 404 included). refresh ignores cached answers and rewrites them; cache_only never reaches the network, uses an entry whatever its age, and turns a miss into CacheMiss naming the kind of request and its URL. An entry that cannot be read is removed and fetched again.

Access policies

Each service in cartolex.collect.services.SERVICES carries its rate limit and what its public documentation said when last checked.

service	checked	what the documentation says	cartolex
OpenAlex	2026-09-28 (help pages updated 2026-08-09 to 2026-09-25)	usage-based access: without a key, $0.10 of use a day; a free API key raises it to $1 a day; a lookup by id is free, a list or filter call costs $0.10 per 1,000, a search $1 per 1,000; more than 100 requests a second, or a spent budget, gives 429; the key goes in the api_key parameter or an Authorization: Bearer header; per_page is at most 100; up to 100 values can be joined with | in one filter; cursor paging starts with cursor=* and ends when meta.next_cursor is null. The current pages no longer mention the mailto « polite pool »	10 requests a second; the key as a bearer header; mailto still sent when a contact address is given (harmless, and a courtesy); DOIs fetched 50 at a time; per_page=100
ORCID public API	2026-09-28 (usage page of 2022-11-14)	anonymous use: 12 requests a second, bursts of 40, 25,000 reads a day per address (100,000 per registered client); beyond the rate the service answers 503; JSON needs Accept: application/json (XML otherwise)	8 requests a second; Accept: application/json
arXiv	2026-09-28 (terms of use, API manual)	no more than one request every three seconds, one connection at a time, for all the user’s machines together; the query API answers Atom (summary is the abstract, arxiv:doi the published version’s DOI); /e-print/<id> gives the source, one gzipped file or a gzipped tar; e-prints may be retrieved for personal or research use, not served again	one request every 3 s, the query and the sources on one bucket; abstracts asked 50 identifiers at a time
HAL	2026-09-28 (api.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs)	no rate limit, key or terms stated on the API pages; 30 rows by default, at most 10,000; cursor paging needs sort=docid asc and cursorMark=* and ends when nextCursorMark equals the cursor sent; the structure referential gives parentDocid_i; metadata are under CC0 (HAL’s reuse conditions)	2 requests a second; 200 rows a page; structures 50 at a time
SciELO (ArticleMeta)	2026-09-28 (the service’s documentation and repository)	no key and no rate limit stated; article/identifiers lists by collection or journal (ISSN) and processing date, at most 1,000 a request with offset, and announces no count; article gives one article by PID, JSON or SciELO PS XML (format=xmlrsps); the monthly dumps are recommended for whole-collection loads	one request a second; an empty listing page asked twice; a collection without ISSNs listed only up to 5,000 articles
bioRxiv and medRxiv	2026-09-28 (api.biorxiv.org)	details/<server>/<DOI>/na/json gives a preprint’s versions, abstract, jatsxml link and published DOI; 100 items a call with a cursor; no key and no rate limit stated	one request a second
Europe PMC	2026-09-28 (the REST documentation page answered 403; the service’s support list of 2024-12-11)	the limit applies per address; no key; search with resultType=core gives abstractText, pmcid and isOpenAccess; <PMCID>/fullTextXML the JATS of open-access articles; rapid requests are reported to be throttled with 503	one request a second
OpenAlex snapshot	2026-09-28 (help pages « Snapshot » and « Snapshot data format », 2026-09-24)	CC0; the public snapshot is released quarterly (the second Wednesday of January, April, July and October), about 626 million records, 745 GB of gzip JSON lines (a Parquet copy beside it) in September 2026; s3://openalex/data/jsonl/<entity>/updated_date=YYYY-MM-DD/part_NNNN.gz, a record sitting in the partition of the date it last changed; a manifest.json per entity (date, record_count, content_length, files with url and meta) and one per format; works/deleted_ids.csv.gz (work_id,deleted_date, since the 2026-09-23 release); records in the API’s shape, with is_xpac and has_content, without content_urls; downloaded with aws s3 sync … --no-sign-request, no account; snapshots before 2026 under legacy-data/, laid out data/<entity>/…	streamed part by part, line by line, a line parsed only when its bytes may match; deleted works dropped; the newest partition wins when a copy holds a record twice; both layouts read
open-access copies (files)	2026-09-28 (OpenAlex help, pages of 2026-08-11 and 2026-09-18)	OpenAlex gives best_oa_location.pdf_url and each location’s pdf_url, on the host that holds the copy; its own cached PDFs (content.openalex.org) need a key and are metered	one request a second per host; OpenAlex’s cached PDFs are not used

The source writers

Collection never writes a table row directly. Each finder stores what it received in the slot’s raw folder, and rebuild_sources rebuilds the six tables from every slot’s raw records:

sources/<slot>/raw/
  ids.parquet              the slot's id registry (cartolex-ids/2)
  <kind>/<run id>.jsonl.gz one run, gzip-compressed: a header line, then one record per line (cartolex-raw/1)

• Runs. RawWriter(layout, slot, kind, header) writes a run to a temporary file and moves it into place when closed: a failed or cancelled job leaves no partial run. Run ids are <UTC time to the microsecond>-<6 hex>, and a new run’s id always sorts after the slot’s earlier runs of its kind, even when the clock repeats itself or goes back; runs are read in that order. The records are compressed as they are written (a large harvest’s works take about a tenth of their plain size), and close writes the header as a gzip member of its own before the records’ member, copied as it is. read_runs and open_run read compressed runs and the plain .jsonl runs of earlier versions alike (run_files lists both).

• Ids. IdRegistry gives t000001, p000001, o000001 from natural keys (a DOI, a service record, an imported row) and remembers every key forever, so an id is never given twice and a new collection never renumbers anything. Text keys are looked up in their slot’s registry only (a text belongs to one slot); people and organisations are shared by all slots. A new number comes after every number any registry gave, skipping ids already in the tables. Its keys live in an SQLite table while it is open, each table’s loaded when first needed (a registry of tens of millions of keys costs disk, not memory), and save writes ids.parquet.

• Readers. A reader turns the runs of one kind of one slot into rows of a SourceBuilder (person, organisation, affiliation, text, part, authorship). default_readers() lists cartolex’s; a finder adds its own kind there.

• Merging. A text reached through several keys keeps its first values and gains the ones it lacked; affiliations of the same person, organisation and source join into one span of years. A slot’s texts are numbered (position) by year, then date, then id.

• A process of its own. Above 256 MB of raw records (ISOLATE_BYTES, with the default readers) a rebuild runs in a child process, which gives back its report or raises what it raised: the process that asked (the app, after a collection) keeps its memory as it was. isolate= forces either way.

• Memory. What grows with the records lives in a scratch database while the readers run (cartolex.collect.workstore.WorkStore, SQLite, in a folder of rebuild_sources(..., scratch=…), by default the project’s cache/, removed at the end; a killed rebuild’s folder is removed by the next one): every record of each text, the texts’ parts (compressed), the authorships, the affiliations, the registry’s keys. A part or an authorship stated twice keeps its first statement (INSERT OR IGNORE), an affiliation’s span widens (ON CONFLICT … DO UPDATE). People and organisations stay in memory. A harvest is read a person at a time, each work reduced as it is read to the project people on it and their institutions (harvest._placed_work: a work can have thousands of authors), and a heavy run (64 MB and more) is read by worker processes in blocks of lines, given back in order (cartolex.scale.ordered_map). The texts are then merged group by group (merge.merge_texts, below), and the tables written a row group at a time (project.tables.SourceTableWriter): memory holds the people, the organisations and one person’s or one group’s rows, whatever the number of records. Rebuilt this way, the tables are the same as when every row was held in memory (checked on samples of a real collection of 50,000 and 200,000 records).

• Kept rows. Rows whose ids no registry gave (tables written by another tool, the demo project) are kept as they are; the others are rebuilt. The same raw records and the same kept rows give the same bytes.

• Aliases. A person merged into another (merged_into in decisions/people.csv) gives their name form to the other’s aliases.

The kinds of raw runs cartolex writes, and what their readers build:

kind	written by	header	records	rows built
people	import_people	the source’s name, the mapping, rows read	one per list row (no e-mail): names, identifiers, filters, organisations with levels and parents	people (import), organisations, affiliations (import, no years)
folder	import_folder	the folder’s name (no path), files seen	one per file read: its path, digest, person, title, year, language, text	texts (folder), one full part, one authorship; people created from sub-folders (folder)
corpus	import_corpus	the index’s name, the unit level	one per index row: names, unit, attributes, file, year, type, language, text	people (import), units as organisations, texts with a full part, authorships in row order
openalex	harvest	the year window; per person: records, names, ORCID, declared DOIs	author records and works as received, with the person and how each work was reached	texts, title and abstract parts, authorships, organisations, affiliations (stated per work, openalex from the records’ years)
orcid	harvest	per person: ORCID iDs	the registry’s works and records as received	affiliations (orcid) to organisations of the same name the person is already affiliated with
resolve	resolve	the threshold, whether acceptance was automatic	each person’s candidates with their evidence and scores	none (kept for the record)
institution_proposals	propose_people	the institutions, the years, the least works, the levels, the source	the institution records of the tree, then every author signed there: record, name, ORCID, works with year and units	none (a proposal)
institution	take_people	the proposal’s run, the levels	the units needed (the institutions above the stated ones included), then one per person taken: records, names, ORCID, aliases, units with years	organisations (openalex, levels, every parent), people (institution), affiliations (stated)
snowball	snowball	the seeds and their records, years, cap, the author threshold, the rounds, the cut, the fit measure, the source	one per collaborator: round, record, name, ORCID, parents with joint works, path, joint works with the institutions stated, fit	people (collaborators), organisations, affiliations (stated)
failures	any finder	the finder	one per person whose collection failed: finder, service, host, status, error, cause, time	none (the coverage report reads them)

A harvest writes one openalex and one orcid run with the same run id. A person’s latest harvest replaces their earlier ones: the readers take, for each person, the lines of the latest run that names them. Within one rebuild, the first record of a text, a part or an authorship wins and later ones only fill what it lacks; readers order their records so that this is the right one (a work with a DOI before a copy without one; the newest folder or corpus run first).

Text hygiene (cartolex.collect.text) happens at the boundary: NFC, lone surrogates and control characters removed, JATS and HTML stripped (block tags become paragraph breaks, a leading « Abstract » label goes), inverted-index abstracts rebuilt in word order, and each part’s language detected (und when unsure).

The demo services

cartolex.demo.services serves, on 127.0.0.1 and a free port, the subset of each API cartolex uses, from a demo world:

from cartolex.collect import HttpClient, local_settings
from cartolex.demo import generate
from cartolex.demo.services import DemoServices

with DemoServices(generate("S", 0)) as services:
    client = HttpClient(local_settings(services.endpoints()))
    services.faults.add("status", service="openalex", status=429, retry_after="2", times=1)

python -m cartolex.demo services --size S --seed 0 --people-list people.csv

The command serves until Ctrl-C and prints each service’s base URL; --people-list writes the world’s people as a list to import, --list-only exits after writing it.

service	routes served
OpenAlex	authors (search, filters id, orcid, affiliations.institution.id, last_known_institutions.id, display_name.search; page or cursor paging), authors/<id>, works (filters author.id, doi with up to 100 values, publication_year, from_publication_date, to_publication_date, type, openalex, authorships.institutions.id, authorships.institutions.lineage), works/<id>, institutions (search, filters id, lineage (an institution and every unit below it), ror, type, display_name.search), institutions/<id>, institutions/ror:<ror>
ORCID	v3.0/<orcid>/works, v3.0/<orcid>/record; XML unless JSON is asked for; 404 for an unknown identifier
HAL	search/ (one clause on authIdHal_s, authFullName_t, halId_s, doiId_s, arxivId_s or docid; an fq range on producedDateY_i; fl; rows up to 10,000; cursorMark with sort=docid asc), ref/structure/ (q=docid:(…), parents in parentDocid_i), files/<halId>/document (a PDF)
SciELO	api/v1/article/identifiers/ (collection, issn, from, until, offset, limit up to 1,000), api/v1/article/ (code, collection; JSON, or format=xmlrsps)
arXiv	api/query?id_list=… (Atom), e-print/<id> (one gzipped .tex, or a gzipped tar with an \input file and a figure), pdf/<id>
bioRxiv and medRxiv	details/<server>/<DOI>/na/json, content/<DOI>v1.source.xml (JATS)
Europe PMC	search?query=DOI:"…"&resultType=core&format=json, <PMCID>/fullTextXML (open-access articles only)
open-access files	oa/<work>.pdf, the copies OpenAlex’s best_oa_location links to

A service still to be written can be a StubService (every request answers 501); register_service(name, factory) replaces any service.

Search is literal on purpose: every word of the query must be a word of one of the record’s names (a one-letter word matches an initial), case ignored, accents kept, so the resolver’s name variants are exercised as in real use.

The bibliographic layer (build_bibliography(world, seed)) is derived from the world with random streams of its own; the world never changes. It holds institution records (one per institution, with a ROR id whose check number is wrong, one lab-level record per group whose parent is its institution, one of them a joint unit with a second parent, a few outside ones), author records, index works (the world’s works whose sources include the index, with their authorships as the index states them: institutions, ORCIDs, outside co-authors), outside works (homonyms, the outside co-authors’ own works on other themes, and a large collaboration of 30 authors, two of them cohort people), the registry (declared works and employments) and the truth: for each world person, the name an imported list shows and the records a careful person confirms. Eight cohort people carry the special cases: homonym, trap (a homonym whose record cites the person’s own lab-level record), split (two records, one work indexed twice, the copy without its DOI), mixed (one record holding an outside homonym’s works and the person’s ORCID), compound, diacritics, moved (an earlier outside institution before a given year) and none. Identifiers stay in the demo blocks: A999…, W999…, I999…, T999…, S999… (numbers beyond those in use), ORCIDs in 0000-0000-…, DOIs under 10.5555, ROR ids 0zz… with a wrong check number. layer_strings(bib) lists every name the layer invents; python -m cartolex.demo create --layer writes them for the vocabulary scan of tools/check.py.

The mini snapshot (write_snapshot(bib, folder), or python -m cartolex.demo snapshot --size S --out DIR) writes the works, authors and institutions the demo OpenAlex serves in the snapshot’s layout (data/jsonl/<entity>/updated_date=…/part_NNNN.gz, manifests, the works’ deletion log), record for record the API’s JSON plus the fields the snapshot adds (is_xpac, has_content), over two update dates; a withdrawn work sits in the older partition and in the deletion log.

The sources layer (sources_layer(bibliography), built once per bibliography) says what the archive, the journal platform and the full-text services hold, again from random streams of its own:

• HAL: a deposit for every world work whose sources include hal, with its authors (idHAL when the person has one, some ORCIDs), their structures (a lab-level structure whose parent is its institution, sometimes the institution alone), titles and abstracts in the work’s language and sometimes a translation, a PDF file for most; a fifth of the deposits of works with a DOI lack it, and half of those carry the deposit’s year, one later; the preprint of some published articles, a year earlier, with an arXiv identifier; a few deposits of an outside homonym;

• SciELO, in a world written in Portuguese: the Portuguese articles and some English articles of the groups that write in Portuguese, with titles and abstracts in two or three languages (translations written anew from the same plan), author keywords, most authors’ ORCIDs and, with bodies, the full text in each language;

• arXiv (world preprints deposited in HAL, and the preprints above, with the DOI of their published version), bioRxiv (the other preprints about the natural world), Europe PMC (half of the published articles about the natural world, most open, with JATS) and the open-access copies OpenAlex links to.

Its identifiers are in blocks nobody uses: HAL ids hal-097… to hal-099…, document ids from 99,000,000, structures from 9,900,000, arXiv ids 99MM.NNNNN (a month new-style ids never had), PMIDs from 99,000,000, PMCIDs PMC99…, journal ISSNs whose check character is wrong. JATS, LaTeX and PDF renderings come from cartolex.demo.services.render. A link in an answer is written demo-base://<service>/…, and the server replaces the prefix with its own address.

Faults (services.faults.add(kind, service=…, path=…, times=…, skip=…)): status (with status and retry_after), hang (answers after delay seconds), drop (closes the connection), malformed (a body cut in half), cut_page (half of a cursor page missing) and early_end (a null cursor too early; for HAL and SciELO, whose pages have another shape, an empty page, each service saying how with a fault_page method). services.requests lists every request received, with its headers.

Resolution and harvest

cartolex.collect.names gives the normal form of a name (folded, particles set aside), the search variants of a person and the similarity of two names; cartolex.collect.openalex and cartolex.collect.orcid the requests and how their answers are read; cartolex.collect.resolve the candidates and their scores (see Collecting people and texts for the rules and the points); and cartolex.collect.harvest the harvest and its readers. The linking rule of a harvested work: a project person is on it at the rank where one of their confirmed OpenAlex records appears, or, when the work’s DOI is one they declared in the registry, at the rank whose ORCID is theirs or whose name matches theirs (similarity 0.75 or more). last is null when the list is truncated or when four authors or more are in alphabetical order; corresponding is null when no author is flagged.

cartolex.collect.privacy.plan_collection estimates the requests of a planned resolution or harvest per host and the OpenAlex cost at its published prices, and lists what is sent and what never is; record_job writes the job’s record (hosts, kinds of data, counts, and the phases a search of collaborators told of) to logs/jobs/collect-<action>-<run id>.jsonl.

The command line (cartolex.cli_collect) reads the contact address and the OpenAlex key from --contact / $CARTOLEX_CONTACT and --openalex-key / $OPENALEX_API_KEY, else the key saved in the app’s settings (cartolex.app.machine.MachineKeys in --data-dir or the default folder), and passes them in as settings; --services demo starts the demo services of --world SIZE:SEED for the command. In the app, ServiceCollection.settings adds the key saved on this computer each time it is read, for a service the launch gave none (use_saved_keys, bound by the app’s runtime unless it is hosted).

Sources of OpenAlex records: the API or the snapshot

The finders ask OpenAlex through an OpenAlexSource (cartolex.collect.openalex): author, works_by_authors, works_by_dois, institution (an OpenAlex id or ror:<id>), search_institutions, institution_units (an institution and every record whose lineage holds it: institutions?filter=lineage:), works_by_institutions (works?filter=authorships.institutions.lineage:) and works_of_authors (the works of many records, asked 50 records at a time). OpenAlexApi(client) sends the requests; SnapshotSource(Snapshot(folder)) (cartolex.collect.snapshot) answers them from a downloaded snapshot. Its prefetch(author_ids, dois) reads everything a harvest will ask in one pass over the authors and one over the works; the institutions are read once; other questions cost one pass each. Snapshot.scan_into(query, store) puts what a pass finds in a RecordStore instead of memory: each record compressed on its own and appended to a temporary file (the source’s spill folder, the project’s cache/snapshot/ from the command line), its place indexed by id, a later copy replacing the earlier one. The source keeps indexes only: the works by the authors and DOIs asked for (a person’s question is a lookup, not a scan), the institutions’ names, ROR ids and lineages. A Query may keep only some fields (select): the works with WORK_FIELDS, as the API is asked for them, those of an institution’s reading with the fields it folds. That reading comes in pages of 100 from its own store, the cursor snapshot:<works before> resuming after a new pass. In worker processes, each part’s matches come back in date order and are let go of once stored: memory holds the parts read ahead, never all of them. works_of_authors (the collaborators’ rounds) still keeps its works in memory. A pass streams each part (gzip, line by line), tests the raw bytes of each line against what is wanted (author, institution or work ids, DOIs, RORs) and parses only the lines that may match; the deletion log is streamed the same way, for the works found only. Snapshot.report counts the bytes, lines, lines parsed and seconds. harvest(…, source=…), propose_people(project, source, …) and snowball(project, source, …) take either source and write the same raw runs, hence the same tables (the tests compare them on the demo world, from the mini snapshot write_snapshot writes). From the API, the harvest asks for the works of consecutive people’s records together, up to batch records a list (AUTHOR_BATCH, 50; author_batches packs them), and gives each person the works their own records sign, in the list’s order: the tables of a harvest person by person (batch=1), in about one request per 100 works instead of at least one per person. A batch whose list fails, or holds a work none of its records signs (a record merged into another), is asked for person by person, where a failure is recorded with the person. A list answer names a work’s first 100 authors only (AUTHORS_SHOWN): complete_authors replaces every work that shows that many, or says its authors are cut, by its own record (work(client, id), free of charge), so that the people further down are found on it; the demo services cut their lists the same way (authors_shown). The works are asked for with select=WORK_FIELDS: the fields the tables and the collaborators’ rounds read (those cartolex.collect.digests keeps), and a few small ones kept for later (other identifiers, retraction and paratext, bibliographic details, where an open copy is, the references, the index’s own topic, kept to compare with and never read to build anything, the last update); a record holds about half of a whole one.

People from institutions

cartolex.collect.institutions: find_institutions(source, name) lists the institutions of a name, with their type, ROR id, parents and works, for a person to choose; resolve_institutions(source, refs) reads OpenAlex ids, ROR ids or URLs holding one. propose_people(project, source, institutions, years=None, min_works=2, levels=None) reads the institutions’ units and the works signed there in the window (the slot’s by default), and counts, per author record, the works where the authorship states a unit of the tree; the authors with min_works or more are proposed with their works, first and last years, units (works and years each), ORCID and the person of the project they already are. propose_levels(units, levels, given) maps each type of institution to a level: given first, then the largest level for LARGE_TYPES (education, government, healthcare, company, nonprofit, archive, funder) and the smallest for the others; a project without levels gets unit and institution when people are taken. Suggested merges pair two records with the same ORCID, or with the same surname, first names that agree (one may be an initial), a unit in common, no work in common and not two different ORCIDs, when one of them, or the two together, reach min_works. The other parents of a joint unit are read too, so that it enters with every parent.

take_people(project, take="all" | ["A1", "A2+A3"], role="mapped", levels=None) takes people from the latest proposal (or run_id): a group A2+A3 is one person with both records. People already confirmed with one of the records are reported, not taken again. Their decisions: identity = confirmed, the records, the role.

Collaborators

cartolex.collect.snowball.snowball(project, source, rounds=1, seeds=None, years=None, cap=None, max_authors=None) proposes the next rounds: round 1 from the seeds (the people named, else every confirmed mapped person with an OpenAlex record), a later round from the collaborators of the round before not refused (decisions/snowball.csv). A round reads the works of the people it starts from (works_of_authors), leaves out the works with more than max_authors authors, and gathers every co-author who is not a person of the project (by record, or by an ORCID a project person has), with the joint works, the people they wrote with and how often; the round is taken only if the people proposed stay within cap, else it is left out whole and named in report.cut. The works are asked for with ROUND_FIELDS (the title, abstract, dates and authors), and a work whose author list a list answer cut is asked for whole only when it shows max_authors authors or fewer (complete_authors(…, max_authors=…)): one that shows more is left out of the graph either way, and with 100 authors shown and max_authors at 25 none is. The collaborators’ own works are then read for their fit (fit_works, FIT_FIELDS, no authors): the works counts of their records first (works_counts, one list per 50 records), then the works of those with 100 works or fewer (FIT_WORKS) 50 records a list, and for each of the others their most recent works a page of 100 at a time (recent_page, sort=publication_date:desc) until the fit has enough (fit_enough: at least 50 works not left out, the joint ones, or 100 more than those): a prolific co-author costs a request, two when most of their recent works are joint ones, not one per hundred works and one per large collaboration. A collaborator the next round of the same call starts from is read whole instead (their co-authors are needed), and that reading serves the next round. The API and the snapshot read the same works for a fit (fit_reading: the same pages of the works, the most recent first). The fit is topical_fit(seeds, candidates): cosine similarity of (1 + ln tf) × idf vectors over the words (three letters or more, folded, the packaged function words left out) of titles and abstracts, idf over the round’s texts (1 + ln((1 + N) / (1 + df))), the seeds’ profile the mean of their unit vectors; a candidate is measured on the works read other than the joint ones, the 100 most recent at most (the joint ones when there is no other). The path of a collaborator is the path of the person of the round before they wrote most with (ties by id), and themselves. cap and max_authors default to params.json’s collect.snowball (200, 25). Collaborators become people (collaborators), context and confirmed in people.csv, with a context row each in snowball.csv; decide_collaborators(project, {person: decision}) changes both (no → excluded, later → undecided, projected → the set collaborators). Nothing is written when a request fails: a round is whole or absent.

snowball(…, progress=…, on_phase=…) says how far it is (the codes collaborators_seeds, collaborators_parents, collaborators_round, collaborators_collaborators with the records done, their total and the works read, collaborators_fit, collaborators_tables) and when each phase ends: seeds, parents, round (the collaborators found, the large works, the cut), collaborators, fit and tables, with their seconds and counts. The app’s job writes each as a phase line of logs/jobs/<job id>.jsonl, with the requests the phase sent, read from the cache and retried. The plan’s estimate (privacy.collaborator_requests) counts the seeds’ works from their texts in the tables and up to cap collaborators like them, and its time takes each request’s answer into account (Service.latency, 0.6 s for OpenAlex), not only the rate: a job sends its requests one after the other.

Failures and coverage

A person whose collection fails in a harvest, a resolution or a HAL search (ServiceError, or CacheMiss in cache_only mode) is recorded by cartolex.collect.outcomes.failure_record and the job goes on; after MAX_FAILURES_IN_A_ROW (3) failures in a row, or a wait longer than a job may block, it stops, keeps what it collected and raises the last error. The failures of a job are one failures run; latest_outcomes(layout, config) gives, per person and finder, the latest attempt, a finder’s run naming the person (people in a harvest’s header, searched in a HAL run’s, the records of a resolution) superseding an earlier failure.

cartolex.collect.coverage: person_coverage(project, good=None) gives each person’s state, counts (texts, with an abstract or a full text, titles only), years and languages, and the first blocking cause (service_failure, no_record, not_collected, no_works_in_window, no_abstracts, few_abstracts); coverage_report(project) adds the states by organisation, the texts by year and by language (each text once) and the slots’ summary; person_sheet(project, person) the sources used (finders with their texts, providers), discarded (candidate records not confirmed, HAL and SciELO proposals, preprints read through their published version) and the attempts; retry_failed(project, client) runs again the harvest, resolution or HAL search that failed, for those people only; add_documents(project, person, folder) imports a folder for one person (import_folder(…, person_id=…)); exclude_person.

Digests: rebuilding the tables quickly

rebuild_sources reads a harvest’s runs (openalex, orcid) through cartolex.collect.digests.DigestCache: each run is digested once into cache/sources/<slot>/<kind>/<run id>.jsonl.gz, the records its reader needs with the costly work done (harvest.work_text: the title and abstract stripped, the abstract rebuilt from the inverted index, their languages detected; the registry’s works lists left out). cache/sources/index.json (cartolex-digests/1) holds, per run, the raw file’s size and modification time and the digester’s version (when one differs, the run is digested again), the records it holds and the people it names. Before the readers run, the runs that are someone’s latest harvest and have no fresh digest are digested, in up to four worker processes when they weigh more than 32 MB; a run superseded for everyone is never read. A digest gives the same rows as its raw run: a rebuild gives the same bytes with digests, without them (incremental=False) or after cache/sources/ is deleted (tested). tools/collect_scale.py measures it on a synthetic collection.

Plug-in points for new finders

• a finder that reads OpenAlex takes an OpenAlexSource, so the snapshot can stand in for the API;

• record a person’s failed collection with failure_record and write_failures, so the coverage report can say so;

• declare the service in SERVICES (rate, lifetimes, policy with its date);

• fetch through HttpClient.get_json / get_all, with a kind and the sends of every request;

• store what was received with RawWriter(layout, slot, "<kind>", header) and add a reader for <kind> to default_readers();

• serve the API subset from the bibliographic layer with a service object and register_service, replacing the stub.

The HAL finder

collect_hal(client, layout, slot, people, *, window, name_fallback=True) (cartolex.collect.hal) searches each person by idHAL (q=authIdHal_s:"…", fq=producedDateY_i:[first TO last], sort=docid asc, cursorMark, 200 rows a page). A person’s idHAL is read from ids["idhal"] in people.parquet (people_refs(layout) builds the list). Each deposit is stored as received, with the person it was found for, in sources/<slot>/raw/hal/; the structures the person stated on it, and their parents level by level (up to four), are asked from the structure referential and stored in the same run. A list cut short is asked once more; a person whose search fails is reported and the job goes on; after three failures in a row the job stops asking and keeps what it found.

A person without an idHAL is searched by name (authFullName_t), and the author forms that match are only proposed: a hal_candidates run lists, per person, each form (its idHAL when HAL has one, its name, its deposits, structures and years, and record, hal:<idHAL> when it has one). No row is built from it; a form is confirmed like any record, resolve.confirm(project, person, ["hal:<idHAL>"]): people_refs reads the idHAL from the confirmed records of decisions/people.csv at once, and the next rebuild writes it into the person’s ids in the people table, where the next HAL collection finds it. A SciELO author proposed by name carries orcid and record (orcid:…) when the article shows an ORCID, confirmed the same way. resolve.identity_queue(project) lists the people whose identity waits with every finder’s candidates, each with the record that confirms it (the resolution’s with their score and evidence).

read_hal_runs builds a text per deposit (key hal:<halId>, source hal): the document type (ART article, COMM and POSTER communication, OUV book, COUV chapter, THESE thesis, REPORT report, UNDEFINED and PREPRINT preprint, others other; images, videos, sound, maps, software and patents are skipped), the year (producedDateY_i), the DOI link (doiId_s), the arXiv and PubMed identifiers, the number of authors; title and abstract parts per language (<lang>_title_s, <lang>_abstract_s, provider hal); an organisation per structure (key hal-structure:<docid>, source hal, with its parents); and the person’s authorship at their rank, with the structures stated for them, and a stated affiliation for the deposit’s year.

The SciELO finder

collect_scielo(client, layout, slot, people, *, window, collection, issns=(), codes=()) (cartolex.collect.scielo) uses the ArticleMeta API rather than the OAI-PMH server: one request gives an article with its titles and abstracts in every language (v12, v83, each with its language), its authors with their ORCID when the journal gave it (v10), its DOI and publication date, in JSON; the same endpoint gives the full text as SciELO PS (JATS). OAI-PMH’s Dublin Core carries no author identifier, tags languages unevenly, and has no full text. Neither route searches by author, so the finder lists the journals it is given (ISSNs, or the whole collection up to 5,000 articles), processed since the year before the window, reads each article, keeps those of the window that show a person’s ORCID, and proposes the authors who only match a person’s name (scielo_candidates). Author keywords (v85) are never read.

read_scielo_runs builds a text per article (key scielo:<collection>:<PID>, source scielo, ids["scielo"] = "<collection>:<PID>"), with title and abstract parts in every language (provider scielo) and the authorships of the people found by ORCID.

Merging works across finders

When the tables are rebuilt, merge_texts (cartolex.collect.merge) merges, within each slot, the texts that are one work, by three rules in this order:

rule	when	listed as
same DOI	two texts carry the same DOI (lower case, no https://doi.org/)	doi, or hal_doi when one side is a HAL deposit’s DOI link
source link	the same identifier under the same scheme (hal, arxiv, pmid, pmcid, scielo, openalex)	link:<scheme>
title and year, per person	two texts with an author in common, the same normalised title (at least three words) and years at most one apart	title_year

Every record of a text counts (its own DOI, title, year and people), not only the values the text kept. The texts are first put in groups: the texts some candidate key could join (a DOI, a source link, a person and a normalised title, a DOI a provider states for a preprint, a text a record names as its version), found by sorting 64-bit hashes of the keys and taking the connected groups. Each group is merged by merge_works, the pure function of the rules, so memory holds one group at a time; a text alone whose records all come from one finder (most texts) takes its fields directly (_alone, tested to give what merge_works gives). A merge is refused, and listed with its reason, when the two sides carry different DOIs or, for the third rule, types that cannot be one work (a thesis and an article); records that reached one text through a shared finder key are listed as key.

Fields. Each field of the merged text takes the value of the highest-priority finder that has one: import, folder, corpus, openalex, scielo, hal, orcid, then the others by name (rebuild_sources(..., finder_priority=…) changes it; SciELO, a journal platform, states the version of record, while a HAL date is sometimes the deposit’s). Ties go to the latest record. Identifiers are united. A value another finder gives differently is kept as a conflict. The text keeps the smallest id of the group; parts and authorships move to it (a clash keeps the most recent part and the smallest rank, and is listed).

Preprints. A preprint and a published version (article, review, communication, proceedings, chapter or report) are never merged: when they meet by the third rule, or a provider states the published DOI (arXiv’s arxiv:doi, bioRxiv’s published), the preprint’s version_of names the published text. A preprint that meets several published texts by the third rule (an article and its conference version) names the version of record among them (article, then review, chapter, conference version); it stays unlinked when two of them rank the same, or when providers name several. The build reads only the published version (corpus.assemble skips a text whose version_of is in the tables): it is the version of record, with its final title, year and DOI, and reading both would count one work twice in its authors’ texts. A published text without an abstract gets its preprint’s abstract parts.

Duplicates the merge keeps apart. Texts the rules keep apart can still be one work: the same article under two DOIs, a conference version with its own DOI, a preprint nothing links. The tables keep them all; corpus.assemble reads one text per work (same normalised title of at least 25 characters, years at most one apart, an author in common), the version of record, and counts the copies it read once (duplicate_texts in its run.json, and a note on the Texts tab).

Everything is written to sources/merges.json (cartolex-merges/1): merges with their rule and evidence, version links, refusals, conflicts and filled parts; RebuildReport.merges counts them. merge_works(records) is the pure function behind it: the same records in any order give the same result, and merging a merged result changes nothing (both are tested on random cases).

Text providers

improve_texts(client, layout, config, *, slots=None, text_ids=None, providers=None, abstracts=True, full_text=False, work_dir=None) (cartolex.collect.providers) improves texts already in the tables:

• a missing abstract, from the first provider that has it, in the order SciELO, HAL, Europe PMC, bioRxiv/medRxiv, arXiv, OpenAlex (its inverted index);

• a full text, on request only (full_text=True): structured texts first, JATS from Europe PMC (open-access articles), bioRxiv/medRxiv and SciELO, then the LaTeX source from arXiv, then PDF files, HAL’s main file and the open-access copy OpenAlex links to.

provider	applies to	sends	full text
arxiv	an arXiv identifier	the identifier	the LaTeX source (abstract, body, format latex); a PDF when the e-print has no source
biorxiv	a preprint whose DOI has the servers’ prefix	the DOI	the JATS the details link to (abstract, body, jats)
europepmc	a DOI (or a PMID, a PMCID)	the DOI, then the PMCID	fullTextXML of an open-access article (jats)
hal	a HAL identifier, else a DOI	the identifier or the DOI	the main file, a PDF (full, plain)
scielo	a SciELO identifier	the PID	SciELO PS: an abstract and a body part per language (jats)
openalex	an OpenAlex identifier, else a DOI	the identifier or the DOI, then the copy’s address to its host	the PDF of best_oa_location, then of the other locations (full, plain)

JATS is read with the sections kept as paragraphs (a section’s title, its paragraphs, figure and table captions; references, formulas and citation markers dropped; translations in sub-article give parts in their language); a document that declares entities is refused. LaTeX is read from one gzipped file or a tar, \input and \include files inlined, accent macros and escapes decoded, maths, labels, citations and comments dropped. A PDF goes through cartolex.lexicon.pdf_text, each file on its own in a temporary file under cache/tmp/, in the job’s PDF worker (below): a file that cannot be read, or takes too long, is reported for its text only.

The PDF worker. cartolex.collect.pdfworker.PdfWorker(timeout) reads each PDF in a separate process (started with spawn, once per job, when the first PDF comes) and waits at most timeout seconds (120 by default) for its text; a file that takes longer is left out with the reason (no text after 120 s), the process is stopped and the next file gets a new one. import_folder and improve_texts open one for their job (pdf_worker(timeout), their pdf_timeout argument), and every PDF they read goes through it (extract_pdf). Tests replace the reading function with extractor="module:function", imported in the worker. A link a service gives is followed only when it is http(s) and, unless the job’s services are local, not a private address.

Providers only store parts, with their provider and format; which parts feed the lexicon and their weights are build parameters. What each one found goes to sources/<slot>/raw/improve/ (with the links it stated), and read_improve_runs adds it when the tables are rebuilt. body and full parts are private (PRIVATE_PARTS, shareable_parts in cartolex.project.tables): see Sources: the data model.

Functions for the command line

The finders and providers of this page are plain functions; the command line and the application call them with one HttpClient per job, which carries the progress callback, the cancel check and the egress record:

function	does	returns
people_refs(layout, person_ids=None)	the people to look for, with their ORCID and idHAL	list[PersonRef]
collect_hal(client, layout, slot, people, window=…, name_fallback=True)	HAL deposits by idHAL; candidates by name	FinderReport (works per person, candidates, failures, skipped, runs)
collect_scielo(client, layout, slot, people, window=…, collection=…, issns=(), codes=())	SciELO articles by ORCID; candidates by name	FinderReport
improve_texts(client, layout, config, full_text=False, providers=None, …)	missing abstracts; full texts on request	ImproveReport (per provider: asked, improved, none, failed; one outcome per text)
rebuild_sources(layout, config, finder_priority=None)	the tables, merged	RebuildReport (rows, merges per rule)
provider_egress(providers=None)	what each provider sends, to which service	a list for the privacy summary
coverage(layout)	per slot: texts, with a title, an abstract, a full text, parts per provider; the merges of sources/merges.json	a dict for the coverage report
propose_people(project, source, institutions, years=…, min_works=2, levels=None)	the authors of institutions and their units	InstitutionProposal (people with evidence, suggested merges, levels)
take_people(project, take="all", role="mapped", levels=None)	people taken from the latest proposal	TakeReport (taken, already known, refused)
snowball(project, source, rounds=1, seeds=None, cap=None, max_authors=None)	the next rounds of collaborators	SnowballReport (rounds, collaborators with evidence, the cut)
decide_collaborators(project, {person: decision})	decisions on collaborators	rows changed
harvest(project, client, source=SnapshotSource(Snapshot(folder)))	the harvest from a snapshot	HarvestReport
coverage_report(project), person_sheet(project, person)	states, causes, aggregates; one person’s sheet	dicts for the interface
retry_failed(project, client), add_documents(project, person, folder), exclude_person(project, person)	the coverage report’s actions	the finders’ reports
identity_queue(project)	the people whose identity waits, with every finder’s candidates	a list for the interface

A cancel raises Cancelled and leaves no partial run; the HTTP cache keeps every complete answer, so collecting again is quick. client.egress.summary() lists the hosts contacted and the kinds of data sent.