[OpenGLAM] BillionGraves index/images now available through FamilySearch

Fri Feb 22 15:02:39 UTC 2013

Tom,

Sorry for the delay in responding to you, but we had a recent addition in
the family (a son) in January and we've been busy.

You bring up a lot of good points. I'm a Mormon, living in Utah (how
stereotypical!), and understand your frustration with working with
FamilySearch. I'm not sure what has and hasn't happened with licensing
discussions. I do have several contacts in the organization though and
would be happy reaching out to them as a member of the OKFN community.

I once contacted FindAGrave about programmatic access to their data, or
obtaining a data dump but never heard much of anything. Has anyone gone
down that route with them? They also seems to lack a clear declaration of
licensing.

Also a note about GEDCOMX and FHISO: it looks like FamilySearch is steaming
ahead on their schema without much external support yet FHISO continues to
sign on influential allies (FGS, brightsolid, and Ancestry.com). It's an
interesting space and one that needs more open data advocates and
practitioners.

-Tod

On Tuesday, December 18, 2012, Tom Morris wrote:

> 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/
>

-- 
Tod Robbins
Digital Collections Librarian, MLIS
todrobbins.com | @todrobbins <http://www.twitter.com/#!/todrobbins>
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