There has been quite bit of discussion over the years about how the Wikimedia movement could engage with those who have research interests in family history or genealogy, and a centralised discussion page [1] has been set up on Meta.
I am posting to ask whether there would be Wikimedian developers who would be interested in joining an open source project to create a free platform independent application called History Research Environment [2] (‘HRE’) for the serious genealogist or historical researcher. Considerable effort has been put into high-level planning over several years, and we are now ready to start writing code.
While the proposed software is not currently an official Wikimedia project, if there is enough interest we are open to it becoming integrated or affiliated in some way. The plan is, in any event, that the software should be interoperable with Wikidata to allow (subject to the agreement of the Wikidata community) the exchange of a variety of structured data including verified and fully sourced family trees.
I'd be happy to answer queries.
Michael Maggs
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_genealogy_project
[2] https://historyresearchenvironment.org
(please excuse cross-posting for greater visibility, as the [wikimedia-genealogy] mailing list still has very few subscribers)
As a PhD student & hstorian, this looks like a really useful idea.
I'm not entirely clear how it would work: is it a GUI for are there any screen mock-ups or such like? Is it a sort of front end for databases like Wikidata?
And the strapline on the site "Towards a history of almost anything" is kinda scary. That's applying a single tool to a huge number of things. Is history that similar to genealogy, and then to biology as well?
John
On 24/05/2017 15:58, Michael Maggs wrote:
There has been quite bit of discussion over the years about how the Wikimedia movement could engage with those who have research interests in family history or genealogy, and a centralised discussion page [1] has been set up on Meta.
I am posting to ask whether there would be Wikimedian developers who would be interested in joining an open source project to create a free platform independent application called History Research Environment [2] (‘HRE’) for the serious genealogist or historical researcher. Considerable effort has been put into high-level planning over several years, and we are now ready to start writing code.
While the proposed software is not currently an official Wikimedia project, if there is enough interest we are open to it becoming integrated or affiliated in some way. The plan is, in any event, that the software should be interoperable with Wikidata to allow (subject to the agreement of the Wikidata community) the exchange of a variety of structured data including verified and fully sourced family trees.
I'd be happy to answer queries.
Michael Maggs
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_genealogy_project
[2] https://historyresearchenvironment.org
(please excuse cross-posting for greater visibility, as the [wikimedia-genealogy] mailing list still has very few subscribers)
Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk
On 25/05/2017 10:10, John Levin wrote:
As a PhD student & hstorian, this looks like a really useful idea.
I'm not entirely clear how it would work: is it a GUI for are there any screen mock-ups or such like? Is it a sort of front end for databases like Wikidata?
Ah, sorry, missed the screenshots page: https://historyresearchenvironment.org/screenshots/
John
Hi John
HRE is not simply a front-end to an online database, but is a fully-featured open source desktop research application which incorporates its own database. The primary use is genealogy, and to that end it's designed to take over and extend the features of the most capable but unfortunately no-longer-supported commercial program The Master Genealogist (TMG). However, the principles behind the study of genealogy are equally applicable to a wide range of historical fields. Historians are very poorly served by the commercial software market, and frequently find themselves locked into expensive or inflexible academic or cultural sector packages.
We have identified the following high-level principles applicable to generic historical research software:
* The data that needs to be stored for history research has a largely common structure usually falling into one of two broad types: 1. a description of something, or 2. how that thing relates to other things (for example via a person, date, time or location)
* A researcher may want to view and analyse the same data from a variety of different perspectives
* Rules can help to validate the veracity of an assertion of a relationship
* High quality research requires an analysis of the evidential base for any assertions that are made, and the ability to be able to report on that analysis.
Traditionally, historians have divided their research into targeted areas such as genealogy, anthropology, ecology, archaeology, military history and so on. The fundamental data and analysis requirements are the same, and can be dealt with in software in a common way even if the things being measured and the rules for validation may differ.
By embracing these ideas the History Research Environment project aims to create a research platform of wide historical and cultural utility.
We would like to encourage Wikimedians to get involved, especially in coding, with a view to interoperability and/or integration with the Wikimedia sites.
More details can be found by following the links from here: https://historyresearchenvironment.org/articles/
Michael (User:MichaelMaggs on Commons)
GitHub: https://github.com/History-Research-Environment/HRE--History-Research-Enviro...
John Levin mailto:anterotesis@gmail.com 25 May 2017 at 10:13 am
Ah, sorry, missed the screenshots page: https://historyresearchenvironment.org/screens
John
John Levin mailto:anterotesis@gmail.com 25 May 2017 at 10:10 am As a PhD student & hstorian, this looks like a really useful idea.
I'm not entirely clear how it would work: is it a GUI for are there any screen mock-ups or such like? Is it a sort of front end for databases like Wikidata?
And the strapline on the site "Towards a history of almost anything" is kinda scary. That's applying a single tool to a huge number of things. Is history that similar to genealogy, and then to biology as well?
John
Michael Maggseatured generalogy and history reserach mailto:Michael@maggs.name 24 May 2017 at 3:58 pm There has been quite bit of discussion over the years about how the Wikimedia movement could engage with those who have research interests in family history or genealogy, and a centralised discussion page [1] has been set up on Meta.
I am posting to ask whether there would be Wikimedian developers who would be interested in joining an open source project to create a free platform independent application called History Research Environment [2] (‘HRE’) for the serious genealogist or historical researcher. Considerable effort has been put into high-level planning over several years, and we are now ready to start writing code.
While the proposed software is not currently an official Wikimedia project, if there is enough interest we are open to it becoming integrated or affiliated in some way. The plan is, in any event, that the software should be interoperable with Wikidata to allow (subject to the agreement of the Wikidata community) the exchange of a variety of structured data including verified and fully sourced family trees.
I'd be happy to answer queries.
Michael Maggs
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_genealogy_project
[2] https://historyresearchenvironment.org
(please excuse cross-posting for greater visibility, as the [wikimedia-genealogy] mailing list still has very few subscribers)
Wikimedia-genealogy mailing list Wikimedia-genealogy@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-genealogy
Dear Michael, thanks again for your question and request. I hope that more members of this list will share their thoughts about this. I guess no one on the list were so ready for this kind of question, we have sort of moved slowly towards a moment when we think we are so many that we can start to look into next step, so far we were just discussing and discussing.
Your question is interesting relevant, and should have had a much better feedback, than those weeks without even an answer.
Lets bring your request a further step, so we can soon move it to the meta pages, and discuss openly.
I have to admit, I was not totally sure about your question, and maybe this goes for others, would you mind tell us more about your plans with this and anything more you want to share. It sounds like a tool, connected to Wikidata, which already sounds very good for a Wikimedia genealogy tool. you may actually turn up with your request in the perfect moment, where technical issues needs to be discussed, we were simply not there, but I guess that the group members will just consider each and every step towards the vision of a wikimedia genealogy website as positive, why your question may actually push us all into next step..
Please fill us in a bit more, and keep in mind, that most users on the list are not programmers, why technical details, may be needed to be presented in an easy way to understand.
I will be excited to get some input from you all on this list, as well as weather we need to wait more, or should go to next step, and start to creat the user group, in order to contact the wikimedia for further questions to move on with the project.
Dan Koehl
2017-05-24 16:58 GMT+02:00 Michael Maggs Michael@maggs.name:
There has been quite bit of discussion over the years about how the Wikimedia movement could engage with those who have research interests in family history or genealogy, and a centralised discussion page [1] has been set up on Meta.
I am posting to ask whether there would be Wikimedian developers who would be interested in joining an open source project to create a free platform independent application called History Research Environment [2] (‘HRE’) for the serious genealogist or historical researcher. Considerable effort has been put into high-level planning over several years, and we are now ready to start writing code.
While the proposed software is not currently an official Wikimedia project, if there is enough interest we are open to it becoming integrated or affiliated in some way. The plan is, in any event, that the software should be interoperable with Wikidata to allow (subject to the agreement of the Wikidata community) the exchange of a variety of structured data including verified and fully sourced family trees.
I'd be happy to answer queries.
Michael Maggs
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_genealogy_project
[2] https://historyresearchenvironment.org
(please excuse cross-posting for greater visibility, as the [wikimedia-genealogy] mailing list still has very few subscribers)
Wikimedia-genealogy mailing list Wikimedia-genealogy@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-genealogy
On 30 May 2017 at 00:11 Dan Koehl dan.koehl@gmail.com wrote:
Dear Michael, thanks again for your question and request. I hope that moremembers of this list will share their thoughts about this. I guess no one on the list were so ready for this kind of question, we have sort of moved slowly towards a moment when we think we are so many that we can start to look into next step, so far we were just discussing and discussing.
Not crossposted. If I didn't reply immediately, it is because I don't currently have much time to contribute, as well as not being competent as a developer.
I have encountered several views on genealogy and Wikimedia, of which two are (a) we need a separate genealogy project, and (b) Wikidata can handle enough salient genealogical facts. Having (c) we need a historical project which would include well-referenced genealogy and which will be close to Wikidata is certainly a useful formulation; and we apparently have such a project, though not in the Wikimedia family.
So I approve. One reason to broaden the scope could be to include information about land holdings, which until about a century ago was a major part of family history. So there is some point, indeed.
Actual practice on Wikidata does include working, via mix'n'match tool, with digital humanities projects such as Stanford's Kindred Britain, http://kindred.stanford.edu/ . I find that site to be reliable on relationships, not always on vital dates. I would encourage discussion of this area to see integration of Wikimedia round Wikidata, and "holding areas" of non-Wikimedia projects around Wikidata, as two sides of a coin.
Charles
wikimediauk-l@lists.wikimedia.org