Life Browser at FamilySearch Labs

FamilySearch Labs has posted a new project for people to review and submit comments about. It is called the life browser, it shows an individual and all the multimedia items linked to that person. The sample shown includes items like Photos, Maps, Census Records, and Historical Photos. Check it out. What do you think about it?
http://www.familysearchlabs.org/

That looks very cool. I like that you can attach video to an individual as well as images.

i tried the labs.org-site ----it was very easy to work--i hope this or something like it will get into the new familysearch... even i could figure teh application without haveing toe the read the instructions
very well done
tom

This is really cool! I would love to have this integrated into the new FamilySearch too! (dream on!?)

Yes, very cool, but I wonder what is the likelihood of being implemented given the additional storage requirements.

RussellHltn wrote:Yes, very cool, but I wonder what is the likelihood of being implemented given the additional storage requirements.

Since many of the source documents, such as Census, Birth Indexes, Death Records, etc. will already be on the system, as they are scanned from the Vaults, I am sure that most of the media items will be attached through some type of linking system instead of storing each record for each individual. With all the documents being scanned the storage space needed will be huge, but I am sure the Church is planning for space for all this information. Storage space gets cheaper as time goes by.

GarysTurn wrote:Since many of the source documents, such as Census, Birth Indexes, Death Records, etc. will already be on the system, as they are scanned from the Vaults, I am sure that most of the media items will be attached through some type of linking system instead of storing each record for each individual.

That would only be true for source documents that happen to be on the church servers. Looking over the sample, I only see about 7 out of 21 images like that.

GarysTurn wrote:With all the documents being scanned the storage space needed will be huge, but I am sure the Church is planning for space for all this information. Storage space gets cheaper as time goes by.

They're already into ground-breaking storage requirements. This will add a significant burden to that. Furthermore, I'd say that this goes beyond the church's goals for genealogy. As such it would seem to me to be difficult to cost-justify.

It would be nice and I'm sure people will want it. But realistically what I'm hoping for is that something will work out so that people can "add" to the basic NFS functionality to give it this ability. Perhaps though the APIs.

RussellHltn wrote:That would only be true for source documents that happen to be on the church servers. Looking over the sample, I only see about 7 out of 21 images like that.

They're already into ground-breaking storage requirements. This will add a significant burden to that. Furthermore, I'd say that this goes beyond the church's goals for genealogy. As such it would seem to me to be difficult to cost-justify.

I don't think adding source documents to an individual is beyond the Church goals for genealogy, a lot of the problems we have now is in the duplication of effort. Displaying original documents will eliminate a lot of that problem.

Some of these capabilities are to encourage more participation. Adding the ability to attach photos and related multimedia will get more people involved in Family History and that is in the best interest of the Church. I would think that a lot of the items included might come from online data bases of Maps and historical photos.

I don't think this type of project would be considered if plans for providing storage space for the project were not being planned. Yes it is a big project, but I think the end results will be worth the investment. The Lord has given us this technology, lets use it to prepare an acceptable record of our ancestors.


D&C 128:24 ... Let us, therefore, as a church and a people, and as Latter-day Saints, offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness; and let us present in his holy temple, when it is finished, a book containing the records of our dead, which shall be worthy of all acceptation.

GarysTurn wrote:Some of these capabilities are to encourage more participation. Adding the ability to attach photos and related multimedia will get more people involved in Family History and that is in the best interest of the Church.

My wife is an intense genealogist and she always finds herself becoming involved with her ancestor's lives. She likes to know about where they lived, if the house is still there, what was going on in the world/country/state at the time, etc. She really thought this application is a great idea because you could add even more information in a visually appealing manner. I think you are correct, if you can get more people to be more invovled with their ancestors it would generate more interest. I think that is when most people get bitten by the "bug".

Just a friendly reminder...

Let's be careful not to approach a discussion on Church policy, doctrine, or scripture. Thanks.

bhofmann wrote:My wife is an intense genealogist and she always finds herself becoming involved with her ancestor's lives. She likes to know about where they lived, if the house is still there, what was going on in the world/country/state at the time, etc. She really thought this application is a great idea because you could add even more information in a visually appealing manner. I think you are correct, if you can get more people to be more invovled with their ancestors it would generate more interest. I think that is when most people get bitten by the "bug".

When I was in Nauvoo Recently, I went to the Land and Records Office. I was searching out information about a Great Great Grandfather, and I was shocked at the amount of information that there was on him in the Land and record office. They had it in a PDF, it contained scanns of several documents, pictures and stories about my Great Great Grand Dad. They even burned me a CD with the PDF on it!! I treasure that Information. It had a map of nauvoo and showed where he lived and everything, I was able to go there and photograph Lot. It really made Family History come alive for me.

I guess my point of this post is that I too agree with bhoffman and think it would be a worth while investment for the church as well

RussellHltn wrote:
It would be nice and I'm sure people will want it. But realistically what I'm hoping for is that something will work out so that people can "add" to the basic NFS functionality to give it this ability. Perhaps though the APIs.

While what I've seen of the Family Search beta is exciting, my family has been doing much of this for some time now. Our site at http://www.flintfamilyhistory.com uses an open source project called phpGedView. It allows ANY documents to be attached to an individual, family, search etc. In passing the head developer of phpGedView has posted his intent to support/use the new Family Search api when it is released. I suspect this will allow families to host their own family history sites while using their site to interact with the new Family Search.

While I feel that a feature allowing documents/images already hosted by the church to be linked the new Family Search tree would be viable (the only space requirement is a couple of bytes to store the link information), I would leave adding other documents, such as photos, cemetery maps, biographies, audio, video, and the like to individual families. There are plenty of photo storage sites etc for us to use.

Getting back to the Life Browser I was very impressed with it. I especially appriciated the ability to add notes to the documents.

I personally think that what is comming out of FamilySearch labs is all going to be intergrated into the NFS in the future. I am just glad that we get to preview the "work-in-progress."