[OpenGLAM] BillionGraves index/images now available through FamilySearch

Tue Dec 18 22:25:10 UTC 2012

Cemetery transcriptions have been crowdsourced since the typescript days.
 In the digital era, FindAGrave has been around a lot longer and has much
more data (91 million graves worth) than BillionGraves (although BG's
mobile app and separate capture vs transcription steps are nice additions).

I don't know if you've ever lobbied a church to do your bidding, but
getting the Mormons (owners of FamilySearch and GEDCOM X) to do anything
other than exactly what they want on either the licensing front or schema
front seems like a stretch to me.  There's also a nascent standards
organization, FHISO, working in this space, but they are in very early
stages. http://fhiso.org/

The type of information that you'd want in your schema depends a lot on
what you are trying to do.  A genealogist would want to see Age added.
 Someone researching stone carvers might want information on symbology.  If
you're going going to have access to legible photos, most researchers would
want a verbatim transcript in addition to any derived structured data.  I'm
not sure how much time you want to invest in all this though, until you
have a project that you're actually going to use it for.

Tom

On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 12:43 AM, todd.d.robbins at gmail.com <
todd.d.robbins at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I had submitted the message below back in June to the Open GLAM [1] and
> Open Humanities [2] (both OKFN lists) and never saw a response, so I
> thought I'd revisit the topic. I've been working on various projects lately
> having to do with local history and civic data. I typed up a very
> preliminary, but potential schema for *Open Gravestones* (a once dreamed
> about OKFN project of which I can't seem to find the EtherPad discussion
> [James Harriman-Smith, any idea?]). Here's a schema example as a JSON
> serialization:
>
> {
> "name": {
> "surname": "Schmidt",
>  "given": "John",
> "middle": "Jacob Jingleheimer",
> "suffix": "[string]",
>  "additional": "[string]",
> "patronymic": "[string]",
> "maternalSurname": "[string]",
>  "paternalSurname": "[string]"
> },
>
> "birth": {
>  "year": "1808",
> "month": "1",
> "day": "1",
>  "place": "Berlin, Germany"
> },
>  "death": {
> "year": "1888",
> "month": "1",
>  "day": "1",
> "place": "Berlin, Germany"
> },
>
> "burial": {
> "year": "1888",
> "month": "3",
>  "day": "13",
> "place": "Berlin, Germany",
> "graveNumber": "[integer]",
>  "mortuary": "[string]",
> "comment": "[string]",
> "block": "[integer]",
>  "tract": "[integer]",
> "lot": "[integer]",
> "space": "[integer]",
>  "segment": "[integer]",
> "level": "[integer]"
> },
>  "headstone": {
> "type": "upright",
>  "material": "granite",
> "color": "grey",
> "comment": "long"
>  }
> }
>
> I understand the keys and/or values of the example are fairly Western and
> at this point don't represent the kind of broad terminology we would
> require. I've been sketching up other versions of the data model and
> potential applications over the past few months as well. I'd love to get
> some movement going on an open source burial grounds data platform as
> genealogical data remains very popular and up until now very is dominated
> by closed data providers. GEDCOM X [3], FamilySearch's genealogical data
> standard project, will likely touch on this topic, but it's not clear when
> that will be or what the licenses will be. Anyhow, I hope this email gets a
> conversation going.
>
> Cheers!
>
> -Tod
>
> [1] http://openglam.org/
> [2] http://humanities.okfn.org/
> [3] http://www.gedcomx.org/
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: todd.d.robbins at gmail.com <todd.d.robbins at gmail.com>
> Date: Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 6:08 PM
> Subject: BillionGraves index/images now available through FamilySearch
> To: open-glam at lists.okfn.org, open-humanities at lists.okfn.org
>
>
> So I've been on the sidelines of the discussion about a potential Open
> Gravestones project [1] within OKFN and have been following the
> BillionGraves [2] project. The index/images are now available through
> FamilySearch, though lacking any declaration of openness about the data. [3]
>
> There are nearly one million records so far, and I'm wondering if OKFN and
> others (the Open Genealogy Alliance [4], for example) would be interested
> in entering talks with FamilySearch and BillionGraves about adopting
> Creative Commons or Open Definition licenses for these types of (generally)
> public domain documents. Since FamilySearch is the largest genealogical
> organization in the world, I figure this could be a worthy project to
> invest some thought and time.
>
> I'd love to get Open Gravestones going and I'm curious of your thoughts.
>
> [1] http://humanities.okfn.org/2012/02/17/meeting-2012-02-15/
> [2] http://billiongraves.com/
> [3] See: https://familysearch.org/node/1714 and
> https://familysearch.org/search/collection/show#uri=http://familysearch.org/searchapi/search/collection/2026973
> [4] http://www.opengenalliance.org/
>
>
> --
> Tod Robbins
> Digital Collections Librarian, MLIS
> todrobbins.com | @todrobbins <http://www.twitter.com/#!/todrobbins>
>
>
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