Suggestions on private firm involvement in genealogy program development
Posted: Sun Jan 28, 2007 12:54 am
Suggestions on private firm involvement in genealogy program development
Here is what I hope to see happen.
1. The Church sponsors the development and operation of this whole cooperative central “finished genealogy” database concept. That way, it can be sure the underlying basic software is appropriate and reliable. I see this database as the summary and index for the whole genealogy world, and therefore needs to be done well.
Trying to chop that single development project into internal Church-created pieces, and external private company-created pieces, while maintaining consistency of concept and quality of code, sounds like a project manager’s coordination nightmare to me. It would probably be better to have a nice conceptual split between the two groups.
2. With the basic database in operation, supplying unique person numbers, the main focus of new private company work would be outside that database, exploiting all the new possibilities for storing genealogy-related media on the web, and then finding, collecting, and displaying that data, publishing it in one-of-a-kind books, formatting and editing it for use on family websites and wikis, storing copies of the collected data on genealogists’ PCs, etc.
All this web-stored data could be tied together by the central database person number. That is the logical breakthrough that can gradually overcome the chaos of today’s genealogy web research and data storage. Having a reliable person number available is probably far more valuable to private companies profitability than helping develop new ways to access the Church’s ordinance files, membership files, etc.
We might view the new person number as a development like the GPS satellites that allowed a huge flurry of commercial and consumer gadgets to be developed and sold.
The private companies would need to create the peer-to-peer client-based programs (simple at first, and then increasing more complex) that would do the “loosely coupled distributed database” processing to help find and assemble media from anywhere on the web, usually tied to individuals identified in the central database. (PAF-like products might find it useful to add this new data element of “central database person number” along with its internal Record Id, Ancestral File ID number, etc., and add in some of the code to do the consolidating of web data.)
At a genealogy conference I attended about two years ago (was it at the BYU Family History Technology conference, noon session?) a librarian from the Midwest forcefully made the point that the world is producing mountains of new data in numerous new media formats, but there were few good places to store this data as it relates to genealogy and specific people. Since then we have seen YouTube.com, MySpace.com, photo storage sites, etc., but has anyone seen such data storage options for more serious genealogy research storage purposes? I don’t know of any. This sounds like a rich mine for private companies to dig in.
3. The traditional PAF-like programs would continue to play an important role for a long time, although that role might gradually change a bit. Right now, I believe nearly all the good data in the world is stored on someone’s PC-PAF-like data file. Normally, if it is in a central file somewhere, it has been degraded or trimmed in various ways on the way in. What is needed is a central file (system) that stores data of as high a quality or higher than found in PC holdings. That is what I am suggesting. But at least for Americans, the PC-held data will probably still be the trusted gold standard for a long time.
Although much new data will probably be keyed directly into the central database, especially links between families in separate submission spaces, large amounts of researched names will probably continue to be assembled and verified in PC-PAF-like programs and then uploaded and linked into the central file. But these uploads will likely be much smaller than the initial uploads. (Periodic downloads containing all updates, will be available for backups, for analysis, and for family purposes no one has thought of yet.)
Here is what I hope to see happen.
1. The Church sponsors the development and operation of this whole cooperative central “finished genealogy” database concept. That way, it can be sure the underlying basic software is appropriate and reliable. I see this database as the summary and index for the whole genealogy world, and therefore needs to be done well.
Trying to chop that single development project into internal Church-created pieces, and external private company-created pieces, while maintaining consistency of concept and quality of code, sounds like a project manager’s coordination nightmare to me. It would probably be better to have a nice conceptual split between the two groups.
2. With the basic database in operation, supplying unique person numbers, the main focus of new private company work would be outside that database, exploiting all the new possibilities for storing genealogy-related media on the web, and then finding, collecting, and displaying that data, publishing it in one-of-a-kind books, formatting and editing it for use on family websites and wikis, storing copies of the collected data on genealogists’ PCs, etc.
All this web-stored data could be tied together by the central database person number. That is the logical breakthrough that can gradually overcome the chaos of today’s genealogy web research and data storage. Having a reliable person number available is probably far more valuable to private companies profitability than helping develop new ways to access the Church’s ordinance files, membership files, etc.
We might view the new person number as a development like the GPS satellites that allowed a huge flurry of commercial and consumer gadgets to be developed and sold.
The private companies would need to create the peer-to-peer client-based programs (simple at first, and then increasing more complex) that would do the “loosely coupled distributed database” processing to help find and assemble media from anywhere on the web, usually tied to individuals identified in the central database. (PAF-like products might find it useful to add this new data element of “central database person number” along with its internal Record Id, Ancestral File ID number, etc., and add in some of the code to do the consolidating of web data.)
At a genealogy conference I attended about two years ago (was it at the BYU Family History Technology conference, noon session?) a librarian from the Midwest forcefully made the point that the world is producing mountains of new data in numerous new media formats, but there were few good places to store this data as it relates to genealogy and specific people. Since then we have seen YouTube.com, MySpace.com, photo storage sites, etc., but has anyone seen such data storage options for more serious genealogy research storage purposes? I don’t know of any. This sounds like a rich mine for private companies to dig in.
3. The traditional PAF-like programs would continue to play an important role for a long time, although that role might gradually change a bit. Right now, I believe nearly all the good data in the world is stored on someone’s PC-PAF-like data file. Normally, if it is in a central file somewhere, it has been degraded or trimmed in various ways on the way in. What is needed is a central file (system) that stores data of as high a quality or higher than found in PC holdings. That is what I am suggesting. But at least for Americans, the PC-held data will probably still be the trusted gold standard for a long time.
Although much new data will probably be keyed directly into the central database, especially links between families in separate submission spaces, large amounts of researched names will probably continue to be assembled and verified in PC-PAF-like programs and then uploaded and linked into the central file. But these uploads will likely be much smaller than the initial uploads. (Periodic downloads containing all updates, will be available for backups, for analysis, and for family purposes no one has thought of yet.)