Past, Present, and Future of Genealogy Software

Tuesday - 1 - F

Convener: Gordon Clarke

Notes-taker(s): Judith Bush

A.	Tags for the session - technology discussed/ideas considered:

Genealogy, death, identity, interoperable citations, remixing, OAuth, OpenID, OpenAPI, GEDcom, digital death, digital heritage

B.	Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:

Discussion began with an overview of the FamilySearch.org role in the genealogy space, in providing a definitive ID for persons. After the overview, there were recommendations for the web “consumability” of the FamilySearch IDs. Gather & Share: Artifacts to boxes Records (census, county), trees (the relationship data), artifacts Share: copiers, email, now websites &blogs Digitize: Boxes to Computer Share: Computer to Web View All (mashing) Web to Computer

QUESTIONS Are there deduping methods? Online and offline software offerings. GEDcom parsing and standardizing libraries in open source from familysearch. Goal is to be best definitive source with n identifier that can be used broadly.

Users of 30+ popular products can collaborate with FamilySearch Data from PAF and Gedcom can migrate in.

Synchronization with Family Search: search for matching people from 3rd part client, assciate person on desktop with person in FamilySearch, Add new people to FamilySearch, Uploiad changed person to FS, download FS person info to desktop. MANUAL merge because individuals have different requirements.

The community can become, collaboratively, authoritative.

Richer Shareable Family History: o	Attachment of artifacts o	Mobile convenience (work incrementally) o	Social Networking (SharingTime, Kynetix) o	Private group collaboration (Public information and private; now able to share with a limited group) o	Community Links and Web resources

REMIXING o	Group trees o	Group Geo-mapping (Names in Stone) o	Group Media Solutions (PhotoLoom, AppleTree, OurFamilyology)

The decorator pattern – digital heirloom project with Microsoft First class objects on persons, events, places

Webresources: photos, records, DNA, Geo, Audio-video

If webresources can search trees and save with FamilySearch IDs, certified with FamilySearch.

What about place and events? FamilySearch would like this sort of things.

[Guided conversation ends now and moves to open discussion]

First class object: given the identifier, you can go get interesting stuff.

Searching led in past, linking growing in importance (in the genealogy domain). Family search has person identifiers (the Family Search ID): good leverage place. People will want to interlink to established research.

Remixing with a match type a person ID and some other ID gives a URL parameter. Matching on a locality? Yes.

Other companies want to create place and time information.

Given microformats things can be spidered.

FamilySearch is invisible to google. Interoperable citation will be bibliographic metadata.

Concern that FamilySearch has saved search URL (not Restful), need permalink URLs. Answer: genIDs?

Discussion of the language mapping between the identity groups and the genealogy group: Person and persona, claims vs conclusions with evidence.

Reputation based recording of conclusion/evidence to personas/persons.

Challenging that the reputation system should resolve into the best to meet the Read Only use case. Optimization is for read-write, curator

FSData.familysearch.org is the demo back of coming interface

Migrated to OAuth. Need to straddle between the access restrictions of legacy data with older familysearch proprietary data. Question of binding between existing system user IDs and OpenIDs. “They know mother’s maiden names.” Implementing Aliasing.