Open Source Astrology Software
In my first career, before I became an Astrologer, I was an Infrastructure specialist in the software industry.
As I was transitioning from astrocurious to actually using and applying astrology in my daily life, I began to notice what I considered to be gaps in astrology tooling. I shrugged and moved on, but after identifying a handful, I began maintaining a list.
In an attempt to address some of these issues, I recently launched an Open Source Astrology Software repository on GitHub at lucidaeon/mediumcoeli so now I can discuss some of the apparent vacancies I see in Astrology tooling.
One I see is a modern, robust, extensible file format for saving, sending, and backing up natal charts and chart collections. Some horoscopic softwares save to a file which is easy enough to identify and store duplicates of. Some Astological platforms provide basic export functionality. But the ecosystem is incredibly fragmented. My thought experiment in solving this is a living specification which I have called JZOD. Something like this needs as many eyes on it as possible so if you have thoughts about the Astrology or the data science, please reach out to me here or on GitHub if you're familiar with the platform.
Author's attempt at self awareness.
Another matter, and tightly related, is the ability for Astrologers to easily migrate their natal chart databases from one platform to another. If there were a ubiquitous file format for natal chart import and export, this matter would be solved. Consider the JPG and MP3 formats. Consider also how you didn't have to do anything particularly special to read this article because your browser speaks HTTP and HTML quite fluently.
I believe Astrologers should be experience at least the same level of ease working with natal charts as they do sending memes. I believe Astrologers should own their data. Is it really yours if you can't copy it to your cloud drive or a USB flash drive? Web based Astrology platforms that do not provide at least a primitive backup function are doing their users a serious disservice.
To address these and other concerns, I created Blackmoon, a utility which can convert between multiple different file types and web platforms. It is also designed with research Astrologers in mind, so it can ingest multiple dissimilar formats and perform de-duplication and consolidation.
So if you've been wanting to try a new Astrology software but found the thought of manually copying your client natal charts between old and new to be daunting or prohibitively time consuming, I hope Blackmoon helps you venture out. You're exactly the person who I had in mind when I first sat down to write it. I'm writing a guide to make it as easy as possible, and I'll update this as soon as it's ready.
All the source code in my repository is released under the Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal license. So you may use my software privately or commercially, and you may modify it or distribute it if you wish. I hope it works for you, and that you enjoy using it. Please reach out if you feel it's missing anything!
-Laurent
