---

📘

August 2024 is a Minor Release

Since January 2022, PDL has been releasing data updates every month with a major release every quarter. Minor releases typically contain fewer product updates or key changes, but still contain important data improvements.

This data version was released on 8/6/2024.

Welcome to our August 2024 release notes! We have exciting updates to share this month!

Here are some of the key highlights:

• A new tabular file format for Data License customers
• Beta Release of our new Role / Subrole Taxonomy
• New Usage Alerts updates to our API dashboard
• Significant QA improvements to profiles in our resume slice

Excited yet? Read on to learn more, or jump to a specific section using the table of contents below.

Table of Contents

❗Breaking Changes

• ⚠️ Upcoming Breaking Changes
  • New Role and Sub Role Job Title Taxonomy
  • Location Country Enum Updates
  • Company Type Enum Updates

✨ New Products and Features

• Table (Flattened) Data License Format
• Role Subrole Updated Taxonomy (Beta Rollout)
• API Dashboard Usage Alerts

🚀 Data Updates

• Freshness
  • Job Changes
• Coverage
• Commentary

🛠 Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Improvements
• Bug Fixes

---

❗Breaking Changes

⚠️ Upcoming Breaking Changes

🚧

Upcoming Breaking Changes

These are upcoming breaking changes in future versions that may impact your current processes. We are announcing them here to provide ample time for you to adjust your processes accordingly.

⚠️ New Role and Sub Role Job Title Taxonomy

Change expected in: February 2025
Previous Announcements: April 2024, July 2024

Products Impacted: Person / Company / IP Schema

As announced in our July 2024 release notes, we are in the process of revising our job_title_role and job_title_sub_role enums by implementing a new job role taxonomy. This breaking change will impact customers using any of the fields in the table listed above.

This month, we are opening up beta access to our updated taxonomy along with a migration guide to support customers through the transition to the new taxonomy. As a reminder, all customers must be fully transitioned to the new taxonomy by February 2025.

The full timeline is shown below:

Timeline

Given the scope of the changes, our goal is to provide clear visibility on the process and ample opportunity to work through this transition together. The projected timeline for this release is as follows:

• ✅ July 2024)- Breaking Change Announcement and Resource Launch:
  • Public notice of our planned role / subrole transition and initial resources provided (see below)
• ✅ August 2024 - Beta:
  • Beta access is now available for the new role / subrole taxonomy which includes a new data field title.class
  • Customers are now able to test sample data through our Technical Services team to explore the new taxonomy and the potential data impacts
  • We have released a guide documenting our recommended best practices for transitioning to the new taxonomy with the beta release as well
  • See section below for more details
• October 2024 - General Availability:
  • We will make the new role / subrole taxonomy generally available for all customers and begin the deprecation process for the previous taxonomy
  • Customers can opt in to accessing the new taxonomy via API and flat file deliveries (but will have the option to delay transitioning until their systems are updated)
• February 2025 - Final Deprecation:
  • We will fully deprecate and officially end support for the previous taxonomy
  • All new and existing customers will be moved onto the new role / subrole taxonomy.

Resources

Please use the following resources to better understand the upcoming changes and to start preparing for the transition. As always, reach out to your Customer Success and Technical Services teams for questions and support.

[✨NEW] Migration Guide: A document that walks customers through transitioning their codebase and datasets to the new taxonomy is here:

• Breaking Changes Guide: Role / Subrole Taxonomy Migration

The new set of canonical classes, roles, and subroles is here:

• Job Title Class [post-update]
• Job Title Roles [post-update]
• Job Title Subroles [post-update]
• Mapping Job Title Class to Roles to Subroles [post-update]

The mapping from the current role/subrole taxonomy to the improved taxonomy is here:

• Role / Subrole Taxonomy Restructure [post-update]

Sample records using the updated role / subrole taxonomy are here:

• Example Person Record [New Role / Subrole Taxonomy]
• Example Company Record [New Role / Subrole Taxonomy]
• Example IP Record [New Role / Subrole Taxonomy]

⚠️ Location Country Enum Updates

Change expected in: October 2024
Previous Announcements: July 2024Products Impacted: Person / Company / IP Schema

In October 2024, we will be updating the set of canonical countries values to better accommodate geographical renamings as well as correct redundancies in our set of country values.

This change is part of an ongoing effort to improve our overall location standardization process within our data. As such it will impact the location country values in our Person, Company and IP datasets.

The updated set of country values that will be released in October is here:

• Location Countries [post-October]

Additionally, a mapping from the current country values to the upcoming country values can be found here:

⚠️ Company Type Enum Updates

Change expected in: October 2024
Products Impacted: Person / Company Schema

Next quarter, we will be updating the set of canonical company type values to include a new public_subsidiary value in the set of canonical values:

This change is part of an ongoing effort to improve our coverage of stock ticker fields and how we enable customers to roll up Company Insights information to public companies. The addition of the public_subsidiary company type specifically is intended to help provide customers a mechanism to easily filter and pull all public companies and their subsidiaries.

---

✨ New Products and Features

Table (Flattened) Data License Format

We are releasing a new tabular file format for our Person & Company Data Licenses. This new delivery format transforms and schematizes our datasets into flattened tables making it easier to load into databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL.

For customers housing their data in relational databases, this tabular data license format helps simplify the ingestion process and accelerate delivery of new information and insights to your end users.

The Tabular Data License Format is now available as an option to all data license customers at no added cost. To request access, please reach out to your Customer Success and Technical Services team.

📘

Note: This is a new file delivery format, and so moving to this format means you will no longer receive your previous format (unless specifically requested).

Role Subrole Updated Taxonomy (Beta Rollout)

This month, we are officially opening up beta access to the new Role / Subrole taxonomy by providing custom data samples. We strongly encourage any customers impacted by the breaking change notice above to participate in this beta rollout and explore this sample data. Our intention is for customers to understand the new taxonomy changes in real data and to begin scoping out any modifications to their data ingestion process.

How it works:

• To request a data sample, get in contact with your Customer Success and Technical Services team
• We will work with you to design a query for our Person and / or Company dataset that we will use to create your custom data sample
• Your custom data sample will contain up to 100k records and will be delivered as a JSON file

Additionally, we have also released a migration guide as part of this beta rollout, that outlines our recommended strategy for transitioning your codebase and datasets to the new taxonomy.

• Breaking Changes Guide: Role / Subrole Taxonomy Migration

Finally as a reminder, all customers must be fully transitioned to the new taxonomy by February 2025, and so we highly recommend participating in this beta release. The full rollout timeline is available in the breaking change notice above. To get started, reach out to your Customer Success and Technical Services team.

API Dashboard Usage Alerts

We are excited to announce updates to credit usage reporting within our API Dashboard.

Usage Alerts
Customers can now set up real-time usage alerts to better track credit usage. Email alerts can be set up with customizable notification thresholds that will be sent immediately once the configured threshold is reached. This new feature allows users to stay informed about usage and top up before running out of credits. To configure alerts, navigate to the Usage Alerts tab in the Settings page.

Usage Summary Reports
Customers can now choose to receive daily, weekly, and/or monthly Usage Summary Report emails. These reports offer insights into credit consumption across all PDL APIs and highlight changes since the previous period. They help identify usage irregularities and plan for fluctuations. To configure these reports, visit the Usage Alerts tab on the Settings page.

API Dashboard Usage Page Updates
Previously, customers could only view monthly aggregated usage, making it hard to track short-term trends. Our newly updated Usage page allows for more granular credit usage stats across any specified date range. Customers can view usage by hour, day, week, month, or year, and access data in a tabular format or as a downloadable CSV for sharing.

---

🚀 Data Updates

📘

August 2024 is a Minor Release

As a reminder, August 2024 is a minor release. This means that the information reported below is based off of the last one month of updates (rather than the 3 months of updates we typically report for the major releases).

Freshness

The number of jobs and locations verified in our datasets over the past month (based on the job_last_verified and location_last_updated fields).

Job Changes

The number of person records where the primary job experience changed in our Person Dataset over the past month (based on the job_last_changed field).

Coverage (Full Stats: Person, Company)

Resume Dataset

Commentary

• Mobile phone linkages increased by 17% as we continue to onboard new sources to improve coverage.
• We made a change to how we define the top-level linkedin_url field. We are now internally validating linkedin_urls and are removing top-level linkedin_urls that result in a 404.
  • We saw a decrease of ~32mm linkedin_urls in our resume data slice based on this change. These records will still appear in the resume slice, but the linkedin urls associated with the profile will only appear in the profiles array and are considered historic.

---

🛠 Improvements and Bug Fixes

Improvements

• We improved our matching and canonicalization logic for schools resulting in more accurate school data in our person records and School Cleaner API
• As mentioned above, we are making improvements to ensure that top-level linkedin_url values do not produce 404 errors.
• We now strip null terminators from all fields in our data
• We now provide gzip and json file formats for our Company Changelog

Bug Fixes

• We fixed a bug in our company data that was occasionally allowing older data to persist in some records
• We updated our list of invalid tokens in our name cleaner to allow some missing profiles back into our dataset