Two future features I would love to see

Two future features I would love to see: user-selected microfilm indexing, and a unique global name identifier for all historical individuals (using a lesson from Google)

At some point in the near future, when the Church’s huge collection of microfilm images are digitized and online in large numbers, I hope there will develop a general realization and consensus that two more major features would greatly enhance that system. One new feature would be a mechanism for users to be able to chose by time and location which microfilm images they wish to transcribe and index for their (and the public’s) benefit. Obviously, users will tend to choose microfilm that is related to their ancestors, and they will have a personal interest in doing the best possible job of transcribing it. They will have a big incentive to do the indexing on pages of data from several record collections so they can reference those document images in their family collections of data. They will be able to direct any interested person to those same images which will be conveniently online, compliments of the Church. This will mean that every genealogist can have many of the benefits of a family website without the need to actually establish their own separate website. There will be no need to copy those voluminous images to their personal site. Allowing users to select the microfilm data they wish to enter and index should greatly supplement the current, more generalized indexing system where images to be indexed are chosen and assigned by the system itself. (From a user’s perspective, the microfilm selections made automatically by the current system may appear to be completely random, instead of being tied directly to the research work the users want to do anyway).

The other feature, the need for which I hope will slowly creep into the consciousness of a large number of genealogists, would be to gradually establish a single identifying number for each person and name in the history of the world. This concept has been suggested many times before by others, but until now there has been no simple and practical way to carry it out, as far as I can tell. Having a unique global identifier for each historical person would allow the efficient cooperation of thousands of descendents in assembling and correlating in one place all known data about that historical individual. Data about one historical person could be on a single central site or on multiple websites and yet all of it could be linked easily and accurately to that individual through this common ID number. Without getting into the details of execution, I suggest that the final identifying number for an historical person be competitively determined (rather than be assigned by any particular group of people). Google uses a similar concept to automatically rank the importance of millions of websites, helping to determine which will appear highest on a search results page. An historical person might initially have several or even hundreds of numbers established as their potential long term ID number, as many genealogists store the overlapping results of their work in a central database. In most cases the number that would be chosen as the key, around which to collect all future data, could be selected relatively quickly and easily by the simple expedient of choosing the number that already has the greatest amount of high quality data associated with it, giving special weight to names with the largest number of links to that person’s relatives. There would naturally occur a positive reinforcement process whereby the best initial version would also be the one most added to, making it grow quickly into the clear winner. The remaining numbers for that historical person would not be deleted, but would just be ignored thereafter.

huffkw wrote:...
The other feature, the need for which I hope will slowly creep into the consciousness of a large number of genealogists, would be to gradually establish a single identifying number for each person and name in the history of the world. This concept has been suggested many times before by others, but until now there has been no simple and practical way to carry it out, as far as I can tell. ...

The PID (Person IDentifier) string used by the New FamilySearch seem to fit your description. Or, is there something you see as needed that nFS doesn't do?

Have you seen nFS? Your second wish just sounds like a slightly different way to accomplish what nFS has done by allowing you to combine individual records into a single person.

My contact with the NFS and its internals is limited to the 1.5 hour demo at the BYU conference last fall. So I don’t know exactly what the PID looks like, how it is constructed, or is intended to do. However, it was my impression from discussions at the demo session that the NFS was originally intended mostly for internal member use, especially for verifying temple work done, and for scheduling new work at temples (it requires member number logons, etc.). Presumably, only names with temple work done or to be scheduled to be done would reside there. It is hard to see how it could directly morph into a generic system that would accept data from any person in the world, regardless of their interest in LDS doctrinal issues, including temple work. It is in the context of this worldwide generic genealogy system that I see the greatest value of the unique identifier for each name. Then all the world’s genealogists, perhaps 40 times as many as those LDS members who might want to do temple work, could join with us in mapping out all the documentable historical persons. For that, a very open and nearly automatic method would be needed to establish agreed-upon new numbers, to allow maximum cooperation and minimal duplication.

There have been postings, in this forum if I remember correctly, that imply that nFS will eventually be opened to non-members.

That would be great. I am guessing that it would require a “fork” as the open source people might call it, to get to a system that could handle the boatload of new issues raised by letting in the whole world, without damaging the good work done already. But it would be well worth it, I believe.

I guess we're each entitled to a guess, at least until nFS is opened to non-LDS. My guess is those developing it have already thought of and handled most (if not nearly all) of the issues.

nFS in it's current form (I think it's version 0.92) is currently open to members and non-members who are working in a FHC. When it hits 1.0, it will be open to non-members.

Yes, one if it's primary purposes to the church is temple work. But it's also the beginning of linking all the genealogies of man in one chain instead of just fragments.

I like the “linking all the genealogies of man” idea very much, but I am concerned about the methods made available to get there. The method of combining duplicate entries within the Church’s billion+ collection of ordinance records is an appropriate response to what I view as quite a narrow and specialized problem. In my humble opinion, that method would not scale well, as they say, to worldwide participation. The current system takes a database containing high levels of duplicates accumulated over many decades using many different processes, and provides a way to merge all those duplicates into a greatly reduced, nearly duplicate-free structure that is current.

However, going forward from here, I do hope the assumption does not continue that duplication can only be fixed long (many months, years, or even decades) after many versions of the same research have been done and entered into a central database, without any easily available prior coordination of effort. My concern is that a method be available that can tell researchers (who wish to participate) what everyone worldwide is doing on nearly a day-to-day basis so that people will no longer spend years on research only to find at the end that it has been done multiple times before, and then need to reconcile the many duplicates. Getting up front with a database of current research might require a little more central computer time, but would require far less manual data management effort, to remove duplicates and to improve general data quality, than waiting until after the fact. Call me a dreamer, but I think it could be done, and it would offer a huge gain to the world over other methods now in use, greatly encouraging wide participation.

huffkw wrote:...
However, going forward from here, I do hope the assumption does not continue that duplication can only be fixed long (many months, years, or even decades) after many versions of the same research have been done and entered into a central database, without any easily available prior coordination of effort. ...

One of the main points of nFS is to coordinate at least the data entry and management part of research in real time. If you and I are working on the same ancestor or group of ancestors, and if you enter some new information, I will see that at the very next page reload, perhaps within seconds. If you have entered something for the common ancestor, and if you allow your contact information to be displayed, I can contact you by phone, email, etc. to coordinate work even more directly. What is it you see as missing?

What you have described sounds good, as far as it goes. For a certain group of people, mostly within the Church, it should work quite well. I could be wrong, of course, but your scenario seems to assume that the (soon-to-be-non-duplicated) base of names in the NFS will be the base upon which all others will build. What if someone who is not linked historically to current Church members wants to jump in and use the system, perhaps someone among the maybe 4 million genealogists outside the Church? How would they synch up with others in the cooperative fashion you have described, without some common base to start from? Would they need to wait until some Church-member-researcher happens to add a name that provides a link for the outsider into the existing database, so they will have a logical place to add their data? Will they even have the necessary logon permissions to be able to add all the data they have collected, whether it is in their direct ancestral lines or not? If they just dump new, unconnected data into the NFS system, will that not set off some “potential duplicate” alarms, figuratively or actually? Will it bring up worries about huge manual efforts needed to reconcile and eliminate duplicates that may have been added?

That is why I am thinking of a more generic method to help more people cooperate, often independent of the current NFS database contents. To begin with, in either case, NFS or my idea, people would be putting in their research work as it is. But in the new method I suggest, at the very point that the work goes in, in most cases, the best-researched and best-lineage-linked version of data about any particular person can be picked out mostly automatically from among what is available at that point. (Or there might be a monthly run to perform this “best data” selection process). After that, there would usually be no need to reconcile any other existing duplicates. The unused ones could just slide into obscurity, as the accepted version grows in completeness and quality through the kind of joint improvement you suggest. Strangely, to minimize the confusion and wasted effort from duplicates, the system needs to be highly tolerant of duplication, accepting it as normal and not disruptive or wasteful, because there is an easy way to pick out the best and leave the rest.

As it is, I believe there is an assumption within the NFS that all duplicates need to eventually be reconciled. Its goal is to be very intolerant of duplicates. But I believe that is mostly because we already have this relatively high-value ordinance data associated with essentially all of them. In the more generic case I am concerned with, the preeminent goal would be to help everybody find the best data anyone has entered and run with it, improving it in a cooperative way, and largely ignore the many other less complete versions that may be floating around in there. A small part of the selected and improved data may eventually have temple work associated with it, but that is not the main concern to begin with. Most outsiders will not share our interest in that aspect of genealogical research.

You seem to have a great many concerns about nFS that I believe are likely due to lack of having done much with it in actual use. I was only in the early 2007 beta test, but many of your questions would be answered by a couple of hours using the system. For example, obviously once nFS is open to non-LDS reserarchers, they will have logins to be able to enter their info. They can upload their info without having to wait for an LDS person to do anything. NFS automatically matches up and merges what it can. It relies on human judgment where it is needed.

It appears to me you perceive many nFS shortcomings, many due to not having used it. It appears to me this conversation is not reducing but is increasing your level of concern. I would propose we wait to continue the discussion until you have used nFS so that we will have a basis on which to discuss your ideas.

In the mean time, if you want to develop a system that works the way you want it to work, go ahead.

Sorry I have managed to cross the line to become irritating. I appreciate your willingness to struggle with me this far. I did spend that 1.5 hour BYU demo time and then did some work at home to try to get my daughter linked up in the database with her husband, but that was not in my permission set, it appears. Those rigid privacy concerns could be quite a constraint on non-members’ use of the system, I assume. It would be strange to have members treated strictly, and non-members given much looser rules.

I guess I will just have to wait until non-member access comes out. Not much more I can learn until then. I brought it up now in hopes that all options might be considered before that launch. I don’t have $tens of millions to sink into new systems or I would give it a try. Having a design is not much good without a team to make it happen.

huffkw wrote:Two future features I would love to see: user-selected microfilm indexing, and a unique global name identifier for all historical individuals (using a lesson from Google)
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I agree that being able to select your own microfilms to index would be great, it does create some problems however. Permissions are needed for the indexing to take place and until those agreements are worked out indexing can not occur. Trying to have everyone pick and choose which films they would like to index would make a huge mess for obtaining the permission agreements. The current system does offer some flexability in choosing which project you wish to work on of those projects which are in process.

I think most of your concerns about the Global name identifier are incorportated in newFamilySearch. Each person is given a unique ID number and when duplicates are combined into folders the Folder is given a unique ID number for the grouping of data for that individual. newFamilySearch has plans to allow original source documents to be added to the folders as well as histories and photos. There is a lot of information about newFamilySearch available and doing some research will help you to see that a lot of what you are proposing is already being implemented into new FamilySearch and it is already available in multiple languages with plans for most of the worlds languages. See some of these sites for more info.

FamilySearchLabs newFamilyHistory FamilySearchIndexing

Regarding unique identifiers for people, you may be interested in the Okkam project. They are interested in creating identifiers for all sorts of semantic entities, not just people.

From their website:

The overall goal of the OKKAM initiative at the University of Trento is to enable the Web of Entities, a global digital space for publishing and managing information about entities, where every entity is uniquely identified, and links between entities can be explicitly specified and exploited in a variety of scenarios. Compared to the WWW, the main differences are that the domain of entities is extended beyond the realm of digital resources to include objects in other realms like products, organizations, associations, countries, events, publications, hotels or people; and that links between entities are extended beyond hyperlinks to include virtually any type of relation.
http://www.okkam.org/

Somebody is really thinking big -- in Italy, it seems, although the OKKAM site would not come up for me.
I think it would be easy to interface the idea I have with theirs. It could be very valuable (and easy) to link people to things and events such as wagon trains, Atlantic crossings on ships, early business companies, etc. I have expected to do that sort of thing anyway, using those kinds of familiar historical connections.