The big problems

What are the big problems in genealogical research today? What recent technologies (and the Internet/WWW in particular) can be used to solve these problems?

An important point to remember is that each of these problems is an opportunity in disguise!

• An abysmal lack of source information. So many trees, so little primary source information.
  • How do we make it drop-dead easy and intuitive for even the beginner to accurately cite their sources? How do we make it more enticing to do so? How do we make adding source data the default behavior in our record managers?

I think the reason we don't see more sources is because most genealogy applications focus on entering conclusions (pedigree data) rather than providing tools for the entire research cycle. What if there was an open-source desktop application where people could:

1. enter what they know about their ancestors
2. click on an ancestor to do research on that ancestor
3. be presented with a list of likely matches from on-line web pages, or off-line sources to look up
4. store the information found in each source
5. visualize the information found in all sources to help analyze which information is really for their ancestor
6. automatically copy the information as source and notes into their pedigree
7. have a way to sync this offline research log with their on-line research log, along with syncing their offline pedigree with their online one, with hyperlinks between pedigree pages and research pages

Would this go far enough to addressing the problem?--Dallan 22:15, 29 March 2006 (MST)

• Lack of consensus on data models/formats, research models. Having said that, I recognize that we all think differently, all see things differently, all have different needs, but how do we cope with those differences in data standards?
• Far too much duplication of effort.
• Too many walled gardens

If the pedigree content is freely available under an open-content license so that anyone could re-use it (so long as they gave proper attribution), would this address this problem?--Dallan 22:15, 29 March 2006 (MST)

• Far too much information in books on library shelves that might never see the light of day. Hundreds of thousands of libraries/repositories across the world with this kind of data.
  • Digitizing the world's genealogical data will cost money. Where will those resources come from?

Digitizing books might be less expensive than you think. Brewster Kahle from the Open Content Alliance told me about a year ago that it would cost about $0.10/page to digitize stuff through their alliance (not sure if that's still true). Also, take a look at Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreaders project. They have digitized, OCR'd, and proofread over 8,000 books over the past 5 years using only volunteer effort. It's pretty impressive.--Dallan 22:15, 29 March 2006 (MST)

• We need some form of single-sign-on pay-per-view service that content providers can utilize to pay the bills. Paypal? One 'bank-account' that I can add funds to, credit from which I can use across a large number of genealogical websites.
• Visualizing pedigree data.
• Research guidance for beginners (and experts). What do I do next? Where do I start? What do I do when I hit a brick wall? I have this document in front of me, what do I do with all the data that's provided by it? Where can I find the contextual information I need to get a better big picture of my data?
• Millions of disparate genealogical websites, all in different formats and layouts. How do we make sense of all of them, find value in them? Find what we're looking for amidst all of them? How do we convince everyone to add Relationship links for genealogical data to their web pages so it's machine-readable?
• Internationalization (i18n). Data models need to account for the wide variety of naming systems, alphabets and characters, calendar systems, etc, etc.
• How can we make WeRelate so easy to use that [insert aged parent's name here] can easily grasp what's going on and contribute in meaningful ways?

I really agree with this point. We continue to try to make WeRelate easier to use, but we know it still has a way to go. Please let me know if you have any ideas in this area.--Dallan 22:15, 29 March 2006 (MST)

• We need to talk to more individuals. What motivates you to do genealogy/family history? What are your goals? What are your roadblocks? What prevents you from doing family history research? There are lots of opportunites and problems to be solved in the answers to these questions.

Feel free to add your thoughts to the list.