The Family History Technology Workshop last Thursday was a lot of fun… and it managed to utterly wipe me out.  There’s only so much my brain can take in before I’m toast.  Fortunately Spring is upon us, so when it was all over my wife and I headed for a park to spend the last few hours of sunlight on a grassy knoll under the branches of a small tree.  *sigh* …idyllic bliss.

What came before is probably much more interesting (to you), however.

In the first session John Finlay (founder and lead developer of PhpGedView) and Christopher Stolworthy (a student and PGV developer) presented their work on the new PGV Collaborative Research Assistant.  This proved instrumental in confusing a lot of attendees, as I presented a demo of the Genesis Research Assistant, which uses PGV, in the hallway between sessions.  I think most of them got it straightened out in the end though :).

Just before noon, students from the BYU Data Mining research groups presented their “Metric-based, Machine Learning Approach to Genealogical Record Linkage” work.  Not only was it a very nice presentation, but it should end up as an agent for Genesis pretty soon.  I was originally planning on using Burdette Pixton’s work, but students have continued to develop it and have made something even better.  I need to get in contact with them.

In the last session Gary Hoffmann presented his “The Rise of a New Software Category: Web-enabled Personal Genealogy Databases” talk, which involved a panel of John Finlay, Darrin Lythgoe (founder of TNG) and Matt Garner (PedigreeSoft) to answer a handful of questions.  What I found particularly delightful was that Gary edited his presentation during the course of the workshop to mention Genesis, and that in answering a question about interaction between genealogy websites (the new FamilySearch.org in particular) John cited Genesis as an example!

If I were asked what the theme of this workshop was, I’d say it would be “The Next Generation of Online Genealogy”.  And I’m not referring to the TNG software (though it does play a part).

My biggest surprise was receiving the award for best demo at the conclusion.  Granted, I think Genesis is pretty cool, but that’s because I see it as it will be, not as it is.  It has so much farther to go.  I like to think I received the award because they disqualified all the vendor and LDS Church demos, and my demo had the prettiest poster of those that remained ;).

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