Driven by a simple question - "where are all the 37mm watches?", I
started a personal database of references - model, reference, case,
dial, strap, hands, calibre, etc. and then, for calibres, frequency,
jewels, functions, size, etc. All told, it's 60 parameters for each
reference
So far, I've catalogued (mostly, not complete for all yet) 6000+ references from an eclectic set of 5 makers - Lange, Blancpain, Breguet, Longines and Patek and indeed in that sample set, 37mm diameter watches seem to be under-represented (and the work has brought to my attention at least one watch that's now on my grail list - Blancpain 6038 - which was the sort of thing I was kinda hoping for)
I'm enjoying collating this data but obvious questions arise: 1) doesn't this exist already? WatchBase is good, but it's hard to form structured searches against and not complete and surely major commercial players must have their own but they aren't (to my knowlege) available to collectors. 2) wouldn't this be a natural for Open Source / community effort?
I'm imagining a database the community could access and even maintain. Plus with some effort we could enable all sorts of queries, like "What gold watches of diameter X have baton hands and flyback chronographs?" Perhaps we could even have a chatbot train on the data and field unstructured queries in natural language.
So I'm asking - is there any interest in something like that (or, is it already out there?) and if so, is there anyone who would want to join me in an effort to bring it about?
