saturn·

quirky lighthouses

source /home/coolhand/html/datavis/data_trove/data/quirky/lighthouses.json 14,585 rows 13 columns profiled 2026-05-01 raw JSON static .html .ipynb Report Notebook

Reading

dataset summary · high confidence anthropic:claude-opus-4-7

This dataset catalogues 14,585 lighthouses and related navigational landmarks sourced from OpenStreetMap, with 13 columns covering location (lat/lon), OSM identifiers, names, operators, build years, light characteristics, and heritage status. Coverage is very uneven: descriptive fields like country (99.6% null), heritage (96.9% null), year_built (93.2% null) and operator (92.7% null) are mostly empty, so any analysis on those needs to acknowledge the small annotated subsample. The most reliable signals are geographic (lat/lon, fully populated) and the OSM-derived fields osm_type and seamark_type — the latter shows the dataset is dominated by light_minor (3,496) and light_major (3,051), confirming its lighthouse focus. Light_character is also worth examining: where recorded, 'Fl' (flashing) overwhelmingly dominates at 75% of entries. Latitude is heavily skewed toward the northern hemisphere (median 40.8°) with 1,295 outliers flagged in the southern extremes.

citing: row_count · column_count · columns · kinds

Schema

13 columns
Per-column summary. Click column name to jump to its detail.
Alerts
name text 0.0% 14,239
near_unique
lat numeric 0.0% 14,572
outliers
lon numeric 0.0% 14,565
country categorical 99.6% 19
long_tail null_rate
height categorical 90.2% 316
long_tail null_rate
year_built categorical 93.2% 429
long_tail null_rate
operator categorical 92.7% 283
long_tail null_rate
seamark_type categorical 48.0% 25
null_rate
light_character categorical 71.3% 19
null_rate
heritage categorical 96.9% 7
null_rate
wikipedia text 86.2% 1,965
near_unique null_rate
osm_id numeric 0.0% 14,584
osm_type categorical 0.0% 2

name

text identifier near_unique
This column holds proper names of lighthouses, with 14,239 unique values across 14,585 rows (near_unique alert) and a mean of 2.33 words per entry. The vocabulary is multilingual: 'lighthouse' dominates at 8,487 occurrences but 'faro', 'fyr', 'phare', 'farol' and Cyrillic 'маяк' all appear, signalling Spanish/Italian, Scandinavian, French, Portuguese and Russian sources mixed together. Despite the near-uniqueness, 346 duplicate names (2.4%) exist, which is worth checking before treating this as a key. Treatment: Use as a display label; do not treat as a unique key without disambiguating the 346 duplicates. high · anthropic:claude-opus-4-7
n
14,585
nulls
0 (0.0%)
unique
14,239
len_min
2
len_max
91
len_mean
18.95
len_median
21
len_p95
27
word_mean
2.327
word_median
2
n_empty
0
n_duplicates
346
duplicate_rate
0.02372
vocab_size
14,670
readability_flesch_mean
75.78
emoji_rate
0
url_rate
0
one_word_rate
0.1068
allcaps_rate
0.05794
boilerplate_rate
0

lat

numeric feature outliers
This is a latitude coordinate in decimal degrees, ranging from -63.40 to 81.80 with a median of 40.81, suggesting a Northern-Hemisphere-skewed global distribution. The strong negative skew (-1.46) and 1295 flagged outliers (8.88%) reflect a long tail into the southern hemisphere rather than data errors. Near-unique values (14572 of 14585) indicate per-record geocoordinates with no nulls. Treatment: Pair with longitude for geospatial features; avoid treating southern-hemisphere points as outliers when modelling. high · anthropic:claude-opus-4-7
n
14,585
nulls
0 (0.0%)
unique
14,572
min
-63.4
max
81.8
mean
34.52
median
40.81
std
24.64
q1
28.11
q3
48.98
iqr
20.87
skew
-1.458
kurtosis
2.028
n_outliers
1,295
outlier_rate
0.08879
zero_rate
0

lon

numeric feature
This is a longitude coordinate, with values spanning -179.20 to 179.34 and a near-symmetric distribution (skew 0.05). The 14565 unique values across 14585 rows suggest each record is a distinct geographic point. The wide IQR of 152.94 and negative kurtosis (-0.95) indicate global coverage rather than concentration in any single region. Treatment: pair with latitude for geospatial analysis; avoid treating as a standalone scalar feature. high · anthropic:claude-opus-4-7
n
14,585
nulls
0 (0.0%)
unique
14,565
min
-179.2
max
179.3
mean
23.04
median
14.97
std
79.4
q1
-40.5
q3
112.4
iqr
152.9
skew
0.0526
kurtosis
-0.9537
n_outliers
0
outlier_rate
0
zero_rate
0

country

categorical metadata long_tail null_rate
Two-letter ISO country codes (LV, DE, EE, HT, US…) identifying record origin, but the column is effectively empty: 99.58% of the 14,585 rows are null, leaving only ~61 populated values spread across 19 codes. Among the few present, Latvia leads at 29.5% (18 records) with high entropy ratio 0.81, so no single market dominates the observed slice. Treatment: Drop or treat as missing-indicator only; insufficient coverage for modelling or segmentation. high · anthropic:claude-opus-4-7
n
14,585
nulls
14,524 (99.6%)
unique
19
top_value
LV
top_rate
0.2951
cardinality
19
entropy
3.442
entropy_ratio
0.8102

height

categorical feature long_tail null_rate
Stored as a categorical, this column appears to record a height as a small integer (top values are '15', '12', '14', '10', '8'), with 316 distinct values and high entropy ratio 0.8234. The dominant signal is missingness: null_rate is 0.9018, so roughly 90% of the 14585 rows have no value, and even the most common value '15' covers only 4.12% of non-nulls. The numeric-looking strings suggest it should be a numeric feature rather than a category. Treatment: Cast to numeric and impute or add a missingness indicator before modelling, given ~90% nulls. medium · anthropic:claude-opus-4-7
n
14,585
nulls
13,153 (90.2%)
unique
316
top_value
15
top_rate
0.0412
cardinality
316
entropy
6.837
entropy_ratio
0.8234

year_built

categorical feature long_tail null_rate
Construction year of the asset, stored as free-text strings that mix four-digit years (e.g. '1875', '1872') with century shorthand like 'C19' and 'C20' — the latter is actually the most frequent value at 31 occurrences. The column is 93.2% null and only populated for 14585 rows, with 429 distinct values and very high entropy ratio (0.93), so the populated portion is a long, flat tail dominated by 19th-century dates. The mixed encoding (numeric years vs. century codes) means this cannot be treated as a clean numeric field without parsing. Treatment: Parse century codes (e.g. 'C19' → 1850) and cast to numeric year; given 93% nulls, add a missing-indicator and consider dropping if coverage stays this low. high · anthropic:claude-opus-4-7
n
14,585
nulls
13,593 (93.2%)
unique
429
top_value
C19
top_rate
0.03125
cardinality
429
entropy
8.142
entropy_ratio
0.9311

operator

categorical metadata long_tail null_rate
This is the operating authority responsible for each entry, likely a lighthouse or maritime navigation aid given the prevalence of coast guards and Plovput. The column is 92.7% null, leaving only ~1,065 populated rows spread across 283 distinct operators with high entropy (ratio 0.861) and the top value (U.S. Coast Guard) covering just 7.7%. Notable signals include a long tail of regional Philippine Coast Guard stations and at least one non-Latin entry (海上保安庁, Japan Coast Guard), suggesting multilingual free-form values rather than a controlled vocabulary. Treatment: Normalize/translate operator strings and group long-tail values; treat missingness as its own category before any encoding. high · anthropic:claude-opus-4-7
n
14,585
nulls
13,520 (92.7%)
unique
283
top_value
U.S. Coast Guard
top_rate
0.077
cardinality
283
entropy
7.013
entropy_ratio
0.8611

seamark_type

categorical feature null_rate
This column classifies maritime seamark features, with 25 distinct types dominated by navigational lights — 'light_minor' covers 46.1% of non-null rows and 'light_major' is the runner-up, together swamping the long tail. Nearly half the rows (48.0%) are null, which triggered the null_rate alert and means this attribute is absent for most records. Entropy ratio of 0.36 confirms heavy concentration in the top two categories. Treatment: Treat nulls as a distinct 'unknown' level and group rare categories before one-hot encoding. high · anthropic:claude-opus-4-7
n
14,585
nulls
7,002 (48.0%)
unique
25
top_value
light_minor
top_rate
0.461
cardinality
25
entropy
1.657
entropy_ratio
0.3569

light_character

categorical feature null_rate
This column captures the light character (flash pattern) of navigational lights, with codes like 'Fl' (flashing), 'Iso' (isochronous), 'Q' (quick), and 'Oc' (occulting) drawn from standard maritime chart notation. It is overwhelmingly dominated by 'Fl' at 74.7% of the 4,188 non-null rows, yielding a low entropy ratio of 0.354 across 19 distinct codes. The headline concern is a 71.31% null rate, meaning the field is populated for fewer than 30% of records. Treatment: Treat nulls as a distinct 'unknown' category and one-hot encode, collapsing rare codes into 'other'. high · anthropic:claude-opus-4-7
n
14,585
nulls
10,401 (71.3%)
unique
19
top_value
Fl
top_rate
0.7471
cardinality
19
entropy
1.503
entropy_ratio
0.3539

heritage

categorical metadata null_rate
`heritage` is a sparsely populated categorical flag with only 7 distinct values across 14585 rows and a 96.89% null rate. The non-null entries are a messy mix of numeric codes ("2", "3", "4", "1") and free-text tokens ("yes", "no", "regional"), with "2" alone covering 75.7% of populated cells. The coding inconsistency plus the extreme nullity suggest this field was populated ad hoc rather than against a controlled vocabulary. Treatment: Normalise the mixed numeric/text codes to a single scheme and treat absence as its own category, or drop given the 96.89% null rate. high · anthropic:claude-opus-4-7
n
14,585
nulls
14,132 (96.9%)
unique
7
top_value
2
top_rate
0.7572
cardinality
7
entropy
1.244
entropy_ratio
0.4431

wikipedia

text metadata near_unique null_rate
This column holds short Wikipedia article titles or links, almost certainly for lighthouses given the dominance of tokens like 'light' (477), 'lighthouse' (335), and multilingual equivalents 'fr:phare' (195), 'es:faro' (181), 'de:leuchtturm' (89), 'pt:farol' (65). Strings are short (mean 22.3 chars, ~3 words) and the column is 86.23% null with only 1,965 unique values across 14,585 rows. The interwiki-style prefixes ('fr:', 'es:', 'de:', 'pt:') indicate a language mix encoded in the values themselves rather than free prose. Treatment: Parse the 'lang:title' prefix into a language code and title, and treat as an optional cross-reference link rather than a model feature. high · anthropic:claude-opus-4-7
n
14,585
nulls
12,577 (86.2%)
unique
1,965
len_min
6
len_max
55
len_mean
22.3
len_median
22
len_p95
33
word_mean
2.996
word_median
3
n_empty
0
n_duplicates
43
duplicate_rate
0.02141
vocab_size
2,370
readability_flesch_mean
48.92
emoji_rate
0
url_rate
0
one_word_rate
0.0762
allcaps_rate
0
boilerplate_rate
0

osm_id

numeric identifier
This is almost certainly the OpenStreetMap object id: 14584 unique values across 14585 rows (effectively one per record), no nulls, and a numeric range from 13,391,742 up to 13,525,496,137 that matches OSM's monotonically growing identifier space. The distribution is right-skewed (skew 1.07) with median 1,574,285,300 well below mean 3,722,756,855, reflecting the mix of older low-numbered and newer high-numbered OSM entities rather than any analytic signal. Treatment: Keep as a key for joins to OSM data; exclude from modelling features. high · anthropic:claude-opus-4-7
n
14,585
nulls
0 (0.0%)
unique
14,584
min
1.339e+07
max
1.353e+10
mean
3.723e+09
median
1.574e+09
std
3.828e+09
q1
1.001e+09
q3
6.402e+09
iqr
5.401e+09
skew
1.073
kurtosis
-0.1991
n_outliers
0
outlier_rate
0
zero_rate
0

osm_type

categorical feature
Binary categorical flag indicating the OpenStreetMap geometry type, taking only the values 'node' (11358 rows, 77.9%) and 'way' (3227 rows). No nulls across 14585 rows, and entropy ratio of 0.76 reflects the moderate imbalance toward nodes. Treatment: One-hot or boolean-encode (node vs way) before modelling. high · anthropic:claude-opus-4-7
n
14,585
nulls
0 (0.0%)
unique
2
top_value
node
top_rate
0.7787
cardinality
2
entropy
0.7625
entropy_ratio
0.7625