Enabling the Distributed Family Tree

This is the official research blog for the Distributed Family Tree, an open network of genealogical data and metadata.  In a nutshell, the big idea is that we can combine all available genealogical information on the Internet into a single distributed network.  The foundation for this network is the substance of the Master's Thesis that I am currently working on.

Links to Parents, Spouses, and Children

by Hilton on Tuesday, March 13, 2007 | 475 Views

Genesis and PGVAgent 0.0.20 are now available for download (and of course update).  Be sure to get both, as neither will work with earlier versions of the other.  The latest and greatest is genealogical connections: parents, spouses, and children are now imported from PGV sites and visible as hyperlinks in the individual view:

Genealogical Connections

What’s really cool (at least in my opinion) is that the data is shown progressively.  When you first open an individual view, all you see is the name, gender, birth, and death information.  PGVAgent then requests additional information in the background, which appears as it arrives.  Unfortunately, the only indication that this is going on is the research view.  I’d like to make it a bit more obvious in the future.

Filed in Genesis, PGVAgent
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    Comments

  1. Permalink to this comment David on March 16th, 2007 at 2:24 pm

    I installed this to C:\genesis, but when I try to execute genesis.exe, it doesn’t respond. Am I missing some dependency or configuration setting?

  2. Permalink to this comment Hilton on March 16th, 2007 at 2:37 pm

    If you don’t see anything at all, it’s probably because you don’t have Java 1.5 installed, or Genesis can’t find it. I’m still trying to sort this issue out, but if you do have Java 1.5 installed, your best bet is to try this:

    Add the path to your Java 1.5 bin folder (”C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_08\bin” on my computer) to your system path (Right-click on “My Computer” either on the Desktop or Start menu, go to the “Advanced” tab, click “Environment Variables”, and edit the “Path” variable in the bottom list box).

  3. Permalink to this comment crex on March 16th, 2007 at 5:04 pm

    Nice work so far. Are you going to write any guides/instructions/examples on how to code agents?

  4. Permalink to this comment Hilton on March 17th, 2007 at 7:28 am

    Yes, I’ll do that as soon as I get a chance. The tricky part is that the API isn’t frozen (because I’m still experimenting), so any agent written at this early stage might need to change somewhat frequently. Before writing a guide, I’ll try to fix up the API so that changes won’t impact other agents as much.

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