genealogy

Genealogy

This is a page for tracking the effort to develop a genealogy (aka family history) microformat for authors and publishers to people and sets of related people that they create and publish.

Problem Statement

Many people are posting their family trees, but if you were searching for your ancestors, there is no semantic in these pages which helps you link them to similar named individuals in your own tree. Some sites like FreeCEN and FreeBMD have databases which can assist in this linkage, but they are incomplete and frustrating to use.

If there were some kind of order to this process, ordinary web searching might be used; and we could interlink family trees more readily.

RDF and the semantic web has been used to tackle this problem, but this doesn't help people who want to publish-, or search published-, trees until there is a real semantic web.

What may be needed is a microformat to add to examples like this tree of Abraham Lincoln.

Also, hCard does not yet have facilities for "flourished" or "baptised", (though these have been proposed); likewise date of death; gender.

See also

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
• history