yology is going to be a system for publishing and managing genealogy data online. Nothing new there — so why bother? There are three specific things that I want to address that I think are missing / weak in current solutions (at least those I’m aware of):
- Story-telling
- Navigation
- Remote-database linking
Story-telling
Genealogy / family history is about more than filling in pedigrees and family group sheets. What makes it interesting an engaging is getting to know ancestors (and extended family) through the personal stories of their lives. Story-telling functionality needs to be a central component of a genealogy application.
I have a couple of published genealogy books, and the content in them tends to be about 80-90% histories and anecdotes of the individuals, with only a few pages dedicated to family group sheets, pedigrees, and such forms. Most of the online genealogy sites I’ve seen (either dynamic or statically generated from an offline source) tend to have that reverse: lots of family group sheets and pedigrees, but few history pages.
I haven’t formed a strong opinion on how this should work in practice, so I’d definitely like some input. I have seen some examples built on top of content-management systems and blogging engines, and that seems to be a good direction — possibly just building a plugin that integrates the specific genealogy functionality into an existing CMS. That way I won’t have to duplicate all the standard stuff like wysiwyg editing, media handling, etc. On the other hand, I want it to feel like all the pieces are integrated smoothly, and that can be hard trying to bolt something on to a more generic framework.
Navigation
Browsing online genealogies can be very frustrating — primarily due to lack of context. Once I’ve clicked through a few links to see different families or navigated back a few generations in a pedigree, I lose the context of how the current page / person relates to me starting point. Navigation through a set of pages needs to be better supported by showing how everything fits together in time and in terms of family relationships.
Related to that, most pedigree navigation I’ve seen sucks. A full page refresh to see the next generation is very disruptive to the user — making it harder to maintain context. Not to mention that most online pedigrees seem to be designed with circa 2000 web technology.
FamlySearch Labs has done some great work in this area, particularly the Family Tree and the Pedigree Viewer applications. Those are primarily prototypes / technology demonstrations, but there’s a lot I’d like to leverage in yology. I’ve also started playing with some prototypes of how I think it could work. So far I’ve only looked at browsing pedigrees, but this has to work across multiple views — pedigrees, family groups, descendency, as well as the histories.
Remote-database linking
There are two conflicting interests with putting genealogy online: keeping ownership and control of the data versus sharing and linking together to form a full family tree of all humanity. The conflict is in deciding to keep the data isolated in its own database and website (thus maintaining control), or contributing to an aggregate database or community (benefiting from data contributed by others, but losing some degree of control).
I think the ideal solution is to support self-contained databases owned by individuals, but with strong support for linking across databases. phpGedView has some support for this, though I haven’t been able to find examples of it used in practice. I’ve read the protocol spec, and it seems reasonable enough as a starting point — it would be ideal to be able to link to sites implemented with other backends (e.g. phpGedView).
Having seamless navigation across multiple distributed genealogy databases would be (will be) excellent. There is, however, another single database that’s extremely important to be able to link to and synchronize with: the LDS Church‘s FamilySearch data. That’s a whole separate issue from the other remote linking issues. The FamilySearch team is actively working with external developers to help build applications using their web services API, and maybe that will prove to be a better model than the phpGedView remote linking mechanism.
Other
Those are the three areas when I really hope to make advances with the yology project. That is in addition to full online editing capabilities, so that yology can be used entirely in place of the traditional off-line genealogy applications. Ambitious? Yes. I’d be happy to have help.
10 comments ↓
Hello Jeremy Slade,
I hear you completely on the story-telling angle. I would love to see MORE emphasis on this in online applications.
Currently, I’m working with the Ancestry.com family tree model, hoping that it will be enough to kill several birds with one stone; i.e. easy for family to follow and contribute, easy integration with their online databases, etc.
I’d like to eliminate my offline genealogy software because syncing is a pain in the butt and it’s just awkward.
I’m not a programmer, so I don’t know if I could be of much help. Just lending an ear to your concerns.
Peace,
“Guided by the Ancestors”
I’ve definitely addressed #3 with my website. Anyone can register for an account and post as much as they like, and retain 100% control over what is posted. But you can link any of yours to any other person (parent, spouse, or child) on the site. Then it’s all seamless when going from one family to another. Click on “Help” and read about the site in much more detail.
For #2, I think my pedigrees are well designed, though they still refresh the page when changing generations. I don’t see an issue with this, as you are really changing all of the information on the page. It’s not like changing one little piece, and refreshing the whole page unnecessarily.
For #1, it can be done in my application posting information in the notes, or by attaching documents.
All in all, my goal is that this is a replacement for the offline application, as having something offline is not helpful to anyone but yourself.
All of these are great points, but it’s imperative that similar metadata structures are used to increase interoperability between web systems and hit the ‘critical mass’ where crowd-sourcing material becomes meaningful. That may be the most difficult and bureaucratic part of all of this. My earlier email about common XML interchange formats was gesturing toward this.
I’m optimistic about some of your work including the pedigree navigation mockup you created. Ideally, software components could be shared across web-based systems that make this easier. I’d love to see some javascript code that could be open source and shared across platforms.
In addition to your point on story-telling, I believe there’s significant room for incorporating photos and other digital media content about your family history as part of that. When you’re telling the story of two relatives, maybe you should include an old photo of them that you’ve scanned? And throughout your story, you could be linking to pages that have more about the individuals in the story. That begins to require software that goes beyond simply storing and sharing your family tree, but also digital objects.
Part of my own work on Omeka (omeka.org) developing digital archiving software is to make it easy to link digital objects and oral history texts together. Using Dublin Core as the base-line for all metadata, I’d love to see online genealogy move in this direction of standardization.
Keep us up to date with your progress!
Dave
@Dave:
re: interchange, getting to critical mass is only going to happen by someone innovating, and the community picking it up. It won’t happen through discussions on mailing lists / blogs / forums, no standards body is going to make it happen. So far, the phpGedView remote linking feature is the only practical option in actual use (that I’m aware of), and really I can’t find any examples of that — maybe it’s just all behind the scenes, but I would expect to see more feedback about it, which I haven’t been able to find.
re: open-source software components. That’s what yology is about! I’d like to create a full suite to cover the backend database to the frontend client interfaces, but I’m also open to doing pieces that might be useful in other systems.
re: story-telling and media. I didn’t explicitly state it, but support for embedded media is a pretty fundamental part of the story-telling aspects. There are some many media-hosting options available (flickr et al), so I hope to be able to leverage that and just make the embedding part as easy as possible.
re: omeka. Looks like I should spend some time learning more about.
@George,
I assume you are referring to http://trees.ancestry.com/ ? I spent a little bit of time with their sample site, and it seems reasonably capable. What’s your experience been? Could it conceivably replace your off-line software? I didn’t do any actual editing, so I have no idea how good that is. I did like the family view as another visualization.
This is an interesting set of posts. You may also be interested in the ones at:
http://www.thinkgenealogy.com/2009/01/12/on-slideshare-10-things-genealogy-software-should-do/
As for me, I have a more mundane Top Ten genealogy software wishlist:
1. Include a process to easily identify potential duplicate marriages and merge them.
2. Include a process to easily remove/delete a set of standard facts from the fact list — i.e., date imported, date updated etc. that occurs when you import others gedcoms.
3. Ensure that when you create a gedcom that it also include photos, documents and other additions you’ve made so those are also imported into the other program.
4. Create a one process option to easily find all locations with variations that include one or more common keywords. You’d use a checkoff to indicate which ones to change to the more correct common listing — Many locations are listed various ways and it would be great to create a single master for these.
5. Have a process which tells you there is duplicate information in the same informational note and what the duplication is. Having an option to review and if you choose cut the duplicate material would be very useful in cleaning up such notes.
6. Have a built in language translation component with specific modules.
7. Have an easy conversion and import from PDF documents, MS word documents etc.
8. Have a built in option to find appropriate illustrations, photos, maps etc. online linked by location, occupation, time period etc.
9. Have a built in link for historical figures (individuals of note, royalty, biblical genealogy etc.) in one’s ancestry that with one click provides authoritative data on lives and careers of such people. One could use to authoritatively determine birth, death etc. dates and add in notes.
10. Built in option to include audio/video documentation of relatives, plus high quality voice recognition to covert multiple peoples (theirs and your own) words as notes without typing.
@Richard,
I appreciate the input, lots to consider there. I had seen Mark Tuckers top-10 list previously, and those are great points as well.
My plan is to focus on these three areas, knowing there’s many other issues that are just as valid. This is what I think satisfies my needs, and I expect to be successful only so far as I can limit my focus and execute well.
@Richard,
I’d encourage you to check out what I have at http://www.gurganus.org/ourfamily. Much of what you listed is already setup in the site I develop & manage.
I certainly agree with your first focus. It seems that no genealogical record manager integrates textual documents well. Conversely, no one wants to deal with genealogical data with applications that handle narratives & family histories well (MS Word, “regular” web pages, wiki pages). We need a well-integrated hybrid.
I’ve often thought that we need a wiki-like application with “plug-ins” specific to a variety of different functions. A user could have a “person” page with plug-ins for as many events as needed, a portrait plug-in, a photo album plug-in, and narrative text plug-in for a biographical sketch. The all the text needs to be linkable to other individuals, events, document pages (with images & transcriptions), etc.
I’ve thought there should be standard versions of a number of page “types” which anyone could then modify at will as far as specific module content, arrangement, color & style. The modules need to be easily added, moved, and utilized.
I’m glad you mentioned the story-telling; I cannot wait for better tools that help everyone get more inspiration from the people surrounding them.
I’ve created a first cut to mark-up and search for interesting pieces from a person’s ancestors; I use Diigo to allow users to highlight and annotate stories, with a label to identify the person from the story, and I allow anyone in our Tolman Family (thomas.tolmanfamily.org) database to find topics for anyone that’s in their ancestry:
http://histories.trentlarson.com/histories/view/
(For a good example, search for “Trent” and pretend you’re “Trent Norman Larson”, then go and browse through the historical stories.)
It’s been hard to explain to people. Hopefully it makes sense to you, and we can figure out ways to make a story-telling/reading interface easy to understand and use.
I believe the solution will be an effective aggregation of many of the tools that are out there, leveraging common standards to allow people to search for and pull down their information they way they want.
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