genealogy

This is a page for tracking the effort to develop a genealogy (aka family history) microformat for authors and publishers to use, to mark up details of people and sets of related people.

Problem Statement

Many people are posting their family trees, but if you were searching for your ancestors, there is no apparent semantic in these pages which helps you link them to similar named individuals in your own tree.

To start, performing some amount of hCard advocacy would help find the people on family trees, and advocating use of XFN across pages representing people in a family tree would also help map out the trees themselves.

Some sites like FreeCEN and FreeBMD have databases which can assist in this linkage, but they are incomplete and frustrating to use.

What may be needed is a microformat to add to examples like this tree of Abraham Lincoln that goes beyond hCard, or perhaps with extensions to hCard to cover genealogical properties/assertions such as "flourished" or "baptised" (these have been proposed), date of death, or gender (which is present in vCard4 and thus expected in an update to hCard).

Next Steps

Per the microformats process:

• genealogy - overview of genealogy microformat effort
• genealogy-examples - research and documentation of existing real world genealogy publishing examples on the web
• genealogy-formats - research and documentation of previous genealogy related formats
• genealogy-brainstorming - brainstorm proposals for a genealogy microformat

See Also

• hCard
• hCard advocacy
• XFN
• history-microformat