Kinderhook, in machine-readable form

A small data file and a set of open scripts, by David Nyman, who lives in the village.

Phones, search engines, and AI assistants increasingly answer questions like "where should we go for a weekend in the Hudson Valley?" by reading structured data — files that name places, people, and events in formats machines can parse. kinderhook.json is one such file, written for Kinderhook, New York. The scripts that build it are open and reusable for any other Hudson Valley village that wants the same thing.

What's in the file

A single schema.org JSON-LD graph describing the village and its constituent places, people, and events. Currently:

• The village of Kinderhook itself, linked to its Wikidata entity
• Notable historic people associated with the village (Martin Van Buren et al)
• Historic sites including the Van Alen House, Lindenwald, the Knitting Mill, the village's Reformed Church and historic district
• Hand-curated entries for the Aviary, Old Dutch Inn, Kinderhook Books, and the farmers' market
• Independent journalism about the village, cited by URL
• Cross-references to Wikidata, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, the village government, and the county tourism site

The scripts that built it

Each external source has a small fetcher script in tools/; refresh-all.mjs runs them in sequence and writes a fresh snapshot to data/snapshots/. The scripts are written for Kinderhook but parameterized enough to be re-pointed at another village by changing a few constants. Anyone wanting to do this for their own Hudson Valley town can fork the repo and start there.

• columbiacountytourism.org — the county tourism agency (taxonomies, events, venues, business directory, posts)
• villageofkinderhook.org — the village government (business directory)
• wikidata.org — entities and historic people associated with the village
• wikipedia.org — encyclopedic summaries
• openstreetmap.org — named features in the village bbox
• loc.gov — Library of Congress, Chronicling America newspaper archive
• data.ny.gov — state datasets (assessments, climate, transportation, farmers markets)
• api.census.gov — Census Bureau, ACS demographic estimates
• fema.gov — federal disaster declaration record

Every snapshot is dated and committed to the repository. The file is rebuilt weekly from these sources by a GitHub Action.

Behind the file

If you want to know how it's built, what's in it, or why it exists, everything is open:

• github.com/harmonicsystems/field-report — full source, every script, every snapshot, every commit
• audit.html — long-form working notes; the research that produced the file
• ai-audit.html — what AI surfaces currently claim about the village, audited by hand each month
• llms.txt — orientation for AI agents that find this site

Maintained by

David Nyman, Kinderhook NY. The intent is to provide a small free technical resource that helps the village — and any other small Hudson Valley village that wants to use the scripts — show up legibly to the channels that bring it visitors. Corrections and additions are welcome via GitHub issues or by writing to davenyman@gmail.com.