In this short drought of posts, I point you to Hilton’s new blog, Enabling the Distributed Family Tree. It’s for his master’s thesis, and here’s the proposal abstract:
While there is a large amount of genealogical data available on the Internet today, most of it is only found in isolated pockets. This causes genealogists difficulty when they try to locate pertinent information, and is often the cause of duplicated research efforts and paralyzing dead-ends. The objective of this thesis is to help overcome these encumbrances through the creation of a universally shared family tree that is distributed, open, scalable, extensible, standards-based, and machine-understandable. We will accomplish this through the specification of a data model and protocol for communications; the development of conformant server and client software; and the use of a natural language search interface, real-time data extraction of Web content, and semi-automatic lineage linkage to drive content expansion.
And I’ll let you read more about it on his blog. :)