Make sure you don’t run afoul of Church and legal restrictions about publishing private information. Locations and addresses are very sensitive information; if non-members or LDS-targetted businesses can get hold of your map and turnit into a mailing list, you may get in trouble.

Best of luck — cool ideas.

The major transition as I see it between something like that and what is needed corresponds to the transition between the text based web and so-called semantic web. I have a friend who works for a firm trying to extract genealogical metadata from published web pages for search purposes and it is exceedingly difficult.

It would be comparably difficult, but for different reasons extracting data from a regularly structured source like a biographical dictionary. But web formatting is highly diverse and does not typically carry the necessary information for structured searches. The data eventually need to be published (at a minimum) in both structured and presentational format, or some hybrid of the two. And even then, without a collaborative edit mechanism for the former, one just ends with data (and error) multiplication that turns into a virtually irreconcilable mess.

One technology that I know of that may be suitable for doing this is that used for distributed source code control (git / arch / Bitkeeper, etc). It is much more scalable than current Wiki technology (which is based on a single centralized database), and has the advantage that it is inherently multi-schema (tree) while allowing for a structured review and edit process.

In other words, if you don’t like some body’s change you don’t have to have it in your tree. But ultimately we would like everyone to work on the same tree, just as Linux kernel developers generally work on variations of the same version, the so called head branch. The system naturally promotes collaboration.

None of us has the resources to do it all by ourselves – we have to cooperate. But we probably cannot run the history of the world on a single database server either – that is where distributed revision control technology comes in handy. Individuals, families, and organizations might maintain only a portion of the tree that they care about, and submit changes back into the reference tree with some sort of editorial quality control.

Now I have talked to some marketing oriented people who think that is all a bit much for neophytes to comprehend, but I see it as ultimately the only way a quality (as in legal or scholarly quality) product will eventually result. A no holds barred Wiki style edit war might be good for a first pass, but at some point discipline has to set in.

Check out http://werelate.org

They’re heading in that direction, perhaps.

By way of information, the site will “probably” be under the domain “ldsdevnet.org”.

Drop me a line and share with me your comments.

Tom

The Church has been working on some nice advances in this field lately as well. Check out Dan Lawyer’s web log:

Taking Genealogy to the Common Person

I’d also download recent Conference addresses, Boy Scout Merit Badge requirements, various study guides (I had True To The Faith electronically long before I had a hard copy) and you’d be surprised how helpful it is to have a copy of the US Constitution at your fingertips when discussing with someone what the text *really* says!