dmclean62@comcast.net wrote:

I am considering starting an open-source project to record family history information including things like birthdays, anniversaries, pictures, video, etc plus perhaps some first hand accounts.

I was wondering if anyone is familiar with any similar projects or software. I was also wondering if anyone was familiar with any research into encoding indefinite information such as approximated dates.

Any helpful suggestions or comments would be appreciated.

Donald

The one thing that kills any similar open source project for family history/genealogy projects is the "Personal Ancestor File" that is produced by the Chruch of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You can find that software at: http://www.familysearch.org/

This software is free as in beer but it certainly is not open source. In fact, the licensing agreement (I haven't checked with the current edition... but this was true in the not so distant past) is so totally draconian that I consider the Microsoft End-User License to be an open source license compared to this one by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. Still, by being free software and having the financial resources of the LDS Church behind it to keep updating/improving features in the software, it has sucked a great deal of the oxygen that would be needed for an open source family history software project. And it includes options for doing things like adding MPEG clips, JPEG photos, essays, book bibliographies, the dates, and a whole bunch of other features as well. There is also a sort of "unofficial intellectual heresy" that would happen at least among Mormons who would try to write something competing against the official church version of the software. This isn't doctrinal, but it adds to that sucking up of potential individuals who might start or help with building such a software package, both with interest and have the technical computer skills necessary to get it written.

There are a couple of competing software packages to PAF, but all of them are commercial in nature that I've seen. And nearly none of them run under Linux, but that doesn't seem to matter to the 60+ year old grandmas who usually get into this sort of activity. Most of the hard-core genealogy researchers are senior citizens, which is something else you need to keep in mind if you want to get into this sort of thing. Not everybody involved is this way, but when you start to realize that you have fewer years left in your life than your computer, you start to get worried about preserving your heritage for the next generation. Certainly any software written should be designed specifically for senior citizens to easily use.

If you are serious about getting something like this written, let me know. I've had writing an open source family history software project as something I've been wanting to do for some time, but it is a large enough task that I know it will require more than one person to get it going. Both that and I've realized the huge uphill battle it takes to get something this complex written, with having something that works pretty good anyway that I don't have to pay for (directly).

BTW, in terms of encoding standards for genealogical data, the premier data encoding standard that is used for nearly all software like this is the GEDCOM data format. Details about this can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEDCOM (BTW, a pretty NPOV article even by Wikipedia standards)

While designed originally by the LDS Church for internal (to the church) data transfers between computers of different operating systems, it has been adopted by nearly all significant genealogical software packages and websites, including several genealogical wikis that I've seen started in a few places. The format predates XML (which is what would likely be used instead if this standard were started from scratch), and so much information is encoded into this format that ignoring it will further marginalize any effort to develop any such family history software. Included in the format are standards for approximate dates, date ranges, different calendar systems, or most other concepts of even recording time at all. It is certainly worth taking a look at if this is something you are interested in exploring in more depth, and is an implemented standard that has already recorded information on more than 1 billion people. I kid you not on that last number.