I'm taking the "Open Discussion" forum title very literally.
A while back there was some talk of where PGV should go, in a general sense. That's good. From time to time one should look up and look around to make sure you're on the right path.
I'm not sure that was done thoroughly. Maybe it was - I have no real connection to PGV or any other online genealogy project.
As I look up and around, and thinking broadly, where should online open source genealogy go?
First, let me say PGV is a great thing. Thanks to all who have made it that way.
But you can't do online family history with it. Family history is raw, growing, youthful genealogy. You can't use PGV (or any existing software, certainly not open source) for online family history because of privacy and security concerns. To be safe - that's the premise here, to be safe - not only should information about living people be omitted from an online database but also information about their recently deceased close relatives and even long passed people who still have living close relatives.
That's pretty restrictive. That cuts into what most people consider genealogy.
Some people do this kind of thing "off line", meaning either software running only on a local machine or without using software to organize and present their research. That's fine but it doesn't foster the sharing and collaboration and connections that PGV does.
This leads to two questions:
* Can or should we steer toward open source, online, private, secure, family history and genealogy?
* What direction is that?
Thanks, ggpauly
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I'm not sure about your statement that genealogy is "youthful". I agree that you should not display living people and probably can't display dead people that are part of an "alive" generation or even the first dead generation. The USA Government waits 80 years before putting out a census (we are waiting on the 1930 census) and some countries wait for 100 years before opening census files.
However, through collaboration I can trace some of my family back to the mid 1600's and in many more cases 1700's. For many of us genealogy is not just knowing the name and birth-death dates of a connected relative, we also learn about cousins and half siblings from of our g-g-g-great grandparents from 200 years or more in the past, and tracing their relatives. Then, if you are a history hound like me, I start associating those individuals to historical events, like wars, plagues, art trends, governments, etc. building a story of how they lived and died. Some of these historical events and historical relations can only be found and understood by collaborating with others because many of us don't speak the language of "The Old Country" and don't have access to the newspapers of the time or place because going to those places is not always possible. In some cases we even research people not yet related to us but on the farm next door or in the same area to build a regional history. You never know what you can learn and enjoy.
So, if we are talking about PGV going forward I think we need to look at better ways to capture history and stories that effect the family directly and indirectly. We should be able to collect information from a point in time and place for individuals connected in various ways (members of military groups, ships, hospitals, communities, …). Maybe you'll find out that your g-g-grandmother's sister studied art at a school during the same time that a 19th century master studied art at the same school. Not genealogy in the pure sense but kind of interesting just the same.
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As I understand it, genealogy is a list of names, dates, and places. It's who is related to whom, when and where were they born, when and where did they die, etc. Family history includes names, dates, and places, but also opens it up to the whole story of the person's life. I was a haoli (White person) attending high school in Hawaii in 1993 - the 100th anniversary of the end of the Hawaiian monarchy. Tell me the events of that time and place aren't part of my family history.
Such free-form information doesn't lend itself to fact-based software like PGV. It's better suited to a wiki.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Your definition of genealogy is not wrong, however …. I'll try to answer without presenting it as doctoral thesis.
The definition of genealogy all depends on the "domain" you are interested in and is not restricted to your family or even humans. In biological terms genealogy relates to an organisms evolutionary history, also known as "phylogeny". If we think of the evolutionary history of non-biological entities then, companies, cities and countries, software, music and art, can all have a genealogy.
Some genealogies are built on a purely ancestral basis and some people only document the male side of the ancestry (they are documenting the family name). I see nothing wrong with this, it is not wrong, but genealogy can be more. Others will therefore include the wives, still more will include cousins. Many reject the notion that their genealogical domain is for blood relatives only and will investigate family that is many times removed from the straight blood line.
I reject the notion that genealogy only relates humans, because when non-biological genealogies intersect with a human (which happens to be in our family genealogy) I think that intersection needs to be documented in the same way that wives, cousins and indirectly related individuals are documented. One example of this is PLACE which is a basic component of your understanding of genealogy. A PLACE (aka city, farm, country, school) is a fact just like the fact that someone had a sister but that place (like your sister) has a genealogy (as stated above) and that place can have a database construct just like an individual. It will evolve and can have an impact on an individual, family, for a long time. That connection can take place for long periods of time, a family can live at a place for 100s of years, and the impact of the place on the family (and the family on the place) is a fact and part of history.
Because PGV is based on the GEDCOM standard, some very specific constructs have been set up that are indeed rigid, because the standard is rigid. Free form information is still fact based, just not contained in a rigid construct. Remember, the GEDCOM standard was developed to aid in communication of information in an age that did not take well to long winded "free form" data. A wiki is a nice idea and I love wikis for their useful properties, but a wiki is not as good of a place to store information as a well defined database construct. Again, I’m talking about data storage, not information interchange. A wiki is a great way to interchange information and potentially knowledge, databases are about storage and data retrieval, to be used to develop additional information knowledge. PGV uses a database (GEDCOM based) to display data in a way that is useful and so that others can build knowledge, which is a form of collaboration (the question that started this thread).
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<QUOTE kfnordan > A wiki is a great way to interchange information and potentially knowledge, databases
are about storage and data retrieval, to be used to develop additional information
knowledge.
interesting this is raised as I installed a wiki app (MediaWiki, as provided by my web host) to see if it would lend itself to stuff beyond the basic Gedcom information. Only to discover the setup isn't meant to be "private" and there's no real provision for such. Much the same as I have PGV open to authenticated users, I'd only want the wiki the same way.
So well I agree there needs to be some way to collect "extra" information, such as the example given by laie_techie, will a wiki work?
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
We have discussed in other threads the use of a wiki as part of a web site. We did (if I remember) discuss the problem with security on a wiki as it relates to the security that we have with PGV. Without the wiki being a part of the PGV security scheme you can not drive (display) pages with the same assurance of PGV constraints. This goes back to the fact (and the reason I'm putting my two cents worth on the thread) that the future of PGV should include some mechanism for extended information that can be related back to the security model where necessary. If PLACE became an full fledged entity I would think that some security would need to be put in place to make sure that any references back to individuals are honored.
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These are great ideas. The place and time idea, with connections to people, is very appealing. Could this be accomplished with some sort of time traveling Google map?
The free-form information/ Wiki thought is also great. Notes can serve this purpose, but they are limited. An integrated wiki having markup (wysisyg of course), indexes, links, etc. would be great. The HTML introduction and News on the welcome page can lend to this, but it should be linked and displayed throughout the genealogy.
There seems to be a general faith in PGV access control which don't completely share. It depends on the coding of PGV and the underlying technlogies such as PHP, the security of the web host and database, as well as the ever-present password strength and security issues.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
There seems to be a general faith in PGV access control which don't completely share. It depends on the coding of PGV and the underlying technlogies such as PHP, the security of the web host and database, as well as the ever-present password strength and security issues.
And earlier, you implied that no online system can ever be trusted for this. Which makes me wonder: Do you ever do any shopping online? What do you think of the fact that the IRS lets you retrieve your tax information from their website? Do you ever say anything in an e-mail you wouldn't think of saying in a shopping mall?
What, if anything, distinguishes these things in security terms?
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Wait, it's convention to not have the living info in PGV online? Granted, I honestly don't use it all that much, but go started in genealogy stuff back in high school; my dad managed everything with Family Tree Maker.
I came across PGV, and the prosepect of being able to put that online in a collaborative environment that anyone in the family could add to and maintain was awesome. I never really thought about it, I figured the security of the app was good enough.
So does everyone that maintains a PGV install only have deceased relatives in there? Do you maintain two separate family trees then, an online one and an offline one that actually has everyone?
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ed Wait, it's convention to not have the living info in PGV online?
Not sure what you are saying/asking here? If I take it literally, the direct answer would be NO. Most, in not nearly 98+% of PGV admins have living persons in their databases. Most also block access to living persons' data, including their names, to all but pre-registered users (with registration restrictions defined by the admin). Depending on where you operate your site, you may be encumbered by laws and regulations that define what can and can not be displayed online and at what age a person is considered to be dead and when that data can be revealed. PGV can handle these requirements with relative ease.
Of the some 77,000 individuals in our database, about 20,000 or so are alive and are listed for non-registered site visitors (not users) as PRIVATE, as we don't even reveal their names.
Hope this helps clarify the situation.
-Stephen
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US Census information/data is not opened to the public until 72 years after the census was taken. In Norway the census information is not opened to the public until 100 years after the census was taken.
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And earlier, you implied that no online system can ever be trusted for this. Which makes me wonder: Do you ever do any shopping online? What do you think of the fact that the IRS lets you retrieve your tax information from their website? Do you ever say anything in an e-mail you wouldn't think of saying in a shopping mall?
What, if anything, distinguishes these things in security terms?
I didn't mean any online system. I meant I don't think existing genealogy websites (Any I know about, not only PGV) are as secure as, say, a good online banking system. As you point out, a good online shopping system with credit or debit card payment might be another, slightly weaker and easier point of comparison.
There is a risk of abetting identity theft and other crimes with insecure online family history. How does this compare with the level of risk involved with online banking or online shopping? Would you rather have the eavesdropper know your credit card information or your place and date of birth, mother's maiden name, and details of your personal history? A credit or debit card can be canceled and there may be ways to limit losses.
Some of the problem can be laid to banks and other trusted websites. Maiden names, etc., are not really secrets, they are just unusual pieces of information that rarely turn up and only close family members normally know. I would guess that most modern 2 or 3-factor authentication systems don't use these, so the most secure places are less at risk from family history information. My banking institutions are not that secure, they use only passwords with backup personal questions, but I wish they were. On the other hand I don't know that they've been directly breached, although I've had to change credit cards numbers several times.
If PGV can be secure enough for family history then a set of best practices must be developed. These should be the defaults. Hosting security, privacy settings, and user registration and acceptance rules are three areas of best practice. Are there more?
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Ahhh, thank you okbigkid. Yeah, for sure I don't have anything visible to non-users on my system. I basically set it up where only registered users (i.e., family members) can view anything, and registration had to be activated by the admin (i.e., me) before they could even use it or log in or anything. All of that makes perfect sense for me. Maybe it'd been a long day…I was reading it like it was unconventional to actually have *anyone* current in your db :-)
Thanks for the clarification!
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
I'm taking the "Open Discussion" forum title very literally.
A while back there was some talk of where PGV should go, in a general sense. That's good. From time to time one should look up and look around to make sure you're on the right path.
I'm not sure that was done thoroughly. Maybe it was - I have no real connection to PGV or any other online genealogy project.
As I look up and around, and thinking broadly, where should online open source genealogy go?
First, let me say PGV is a great thing. Thanks to all who have made it that way.
But you can't do online family history with it. Family history is raw, growing, youthful genealogy. You can't use PGV (or any existing software, certainly not open source) for online family history because of privacy and security concerns. To be safe - that's the premise here, to be safe - not only should information about living people be omitted from an online database but also information about their recently deceased close relatives and even long passed people who still have living close relatives.
That's pretty restrictive. That cuts into what most people consider genealogy.
Some people do this kind of thing "off line", meaning either software running only on a local machine or without using software to organize and present their research. That's fine but it doesn't foster the sharing and collaboration and connections that PGV does.
This leads to two questions:
* Can or should we steer toward open source, online, private, secure, family history and genealogy?
* What direction is that?
Thanks, ggpauly
I'm not sure about your statement that genealogy is "youthful". I agree that you should not display living people and probably can't display dead people that are part of an "alive" generation or even the first dead generation. The USA Government waits 80 years before putting out a census (we are waiting on the 1930 census) and some countries wait for 100 years before opening census files.
However, through collaboration I can trace some of my family back to the mid 1600's and in many more cases 1700's. For many of us genealogy is not just knowing the name and birth-death dates of a connected relative, we also learn about cousins and half siblings from of our g-g-g-great grandparents from 200 years or more in the past, and tracing their relatives. Then, if you are a history hound like me, I start associating those individuals to historical events, like wars, plagues, art trends, governments, etc. building a story of how they lived and died. Some of these historical events and historical relations can only be found and understood by collaborating with others because many of us don't speak the language of "The Old Country" and don't have access to the newspapers of the time or place because going to those places is not always possible. In some cases we even research people not yet related to us but on the farm next door or in the same area to build a regional history. You never know what you can learn and enjoy.
So, if we are talking about PGV going forward I think we need to look at better ways to capture history and stories that effect the family directly and indirectly. We should be able to collect information from a point in time and place for individuals connected in various ways (members of military groups, ships, hospitals, communities, …). Maybe you'll find out that your g-g-grandmother's sister studied art at a school during the same time that a 19th century master studied art at the same school. Not genealogy in the pure sense but kind of interesting just the same.
As I understand it, genealogy is a list of names, dates, and places. It's who is related to whom, when and where were they born, when and where did they die, etc. Family history includes names, dates, and places, but also opens it up to the whole story of the person's life. I was a haoli (White person) attending high school in Hawaii in 1993 - the 100th anniversary of the end of the Hawaiian monarchy. Tell me the events of that time and place aren't part of my family history.
Such free-form information doesn't lend itself to fact-based software like PGV. It's better suited to a wiki.
Your definition of genealogy is not wrong, however …. I'll try to answer without presenting it as doctoral thesis.
The definition of genealogy all depends on the "domain" you are interested in and is not restricted to your family or even humans. In biological terms genealogy relates to an organisms evolutionary history, also known as "phylogeny". If we think of the evolutionary history of non-biological entities then, companies, cities and countries, software, music and art, can all have a genealogy.
Some genealogies are built on a purely ancestral basis and some people only document the male side of the ancestry (they are documenting the family name). I see nothing wrong with this, it is not wrong, but genealogy can be more. Others will therefore include the wives, still more will include cousins. Many reject the notion that their genealogical domain is for blood relatives only and will investigate family that is many times removed from the straight blood line.
I reject the notion that genealogy only relates humans, because when non-biological genealogies intersect with a human (which happens to be in our family genealogy) I think that intersection needs to be documented in the same way that wives, cousins and indirectly related individuals are documented. One example of this is PLACE which is a basic component of your understanding of genealogy. A PLACE (aka city, farm, country, school) is a fact just like the fact that someone had a sister but that place (like your sister) has a genealogy (as stated above) and that place can have a database construct just like an individual. It will evolve and can have an impact on an individual, family, for a long time. That connection can take place for long periods of time, a family can live at a place for 100s of years, and the impact of the place on the family (and the family on the place) is a fact and part of history.
Because PGV is based on the GEDCOM standard, some very specific constructs have been set up that are indeed rigid, because the standard is rigid. Free form information is still fact based, just not contained in a rigid construct. Remember, the GEDCOM standard was developed to aid in communication of information in an age that did not take well to long winded "free form" data. A wiki is a nice idea and I love wikis for their useful properties, but a wiki is not as good of a place to store information as a well defined database construct. Again, I’m talking about data storage, not information interchange. A wiki is a great way to interchange information and potentially knowledge, databases are about storage and data retrieval, to be used to develop additional information knowledge. PGV uses a database (GEDCOM based) to display data in a way that is useful and so that others can build knowledge, which is a form of collaboration (the question that started this thread).
<QUOTE kfnordan > A wiki is a great way to interchange information and potentially knowledge, databases
are about storage and data retrieval, to be used to develop additional information
knowledge.
interesting this is raised as I installed a wiki app (MediaWiki, as provided by my web host) to see if it would lend itself to stuff beyond the basic Gedcom information. Only to discover the setup isn't meant to be "private" and there's no real provision for such. Much the same as I have PGV open to authenticated users, I'd only want the wiki the same way.
So well I agree there needs to be some way to collect "extra" information, such as the example given by laie_techie, will a wiki work?
We have discussed in other threads the use of a wiki as part of a web site. We did (if I remember) discuss the problem with security on a wiki as it relates to the security that we have with PGV. Without the wiki being a part of the PGV security scheme you can not drive (display) pages with the same assurance of PGV constraints. This goes back to the fact (and the reason I'm putting my two cents worth on the thread) that the future of PGV should include some mechanism for extended information that can be related back to the security model where necessary. If PLACE became an full fledged entity I would think that some security would need to be put in place to make sure that any references back to individuals are honored.
I should have said "to make sure that any references back to individuals would be honored based on PGV security/privacy contraints."
These are great ideas. The place and time idea, with connections to people, is very appealing. Could this be accomplished with some sort of time traveling Google map?
The free-form information/ Wiki thought is also great. Notes can serve this purpose, but they are limited. An integrated wiki having markup (wysisyg of course), indexes, links, etc. would be great. The HTML introduction and News on the welcome page can lend to this, but it should be linked and displayed throughout the genealogy.
There seems to be a general faith in PGV access control which don't completely share. It depends on the coding of PGV and the underlying technlogies such as PHP, the security of the web host and database, as well as the ever-present password strength and security issues.
And earlier, you implied that no online system can ever be trusted for this. Which makes me wonder: Do you ever do any shopping online? What do you think of the fact that the IRS lets you retrieve your tax information from their website? Do you ever say anything in an e-mail you wouldn't think of saying in a shopping mall?
What, if anything, distinguishes these things in security terms?
Wait, it's convention to not have the living info in PGV online? Granted, I honestly don't use it all that much, but go started in genealogy stuff back in high school; my dad managed everything with Family Tree Maker.
I came across PGV, and the prosepect of being able to put that online in a collaborative environment that anyone in the family could add to and maintain was awesome. I never really thought about it, I figured the security of the app was good enough.
So does everyone that maintains a PGV install only have deceased relatives in there? Do you maintain two separate family trees then, an online one and an offline one that actually has everyone?
ed
Wait, it's convention to not have the living info in PGV online?Not sure what you are saying/asking here? If I take it literally, the direct answer would be NO. Most, in not nearly 98+% of PGV admins have living persons in their databases. Most also block access to living persons' data, including their names, to all but pre-registered users (with registration restrictions defined by the admin). Depending on where you operate your site, you may be encumbered by laws and regulations that define what can and can not be displayed online and at what age a person is considered to be dead and when that data can be revealed. PGV can handle these requirements with relative ease.
Of the some 77,000 individuals in our database, about 20,000 or so are alive and are listed for non-registered site visitors (not users) as PRIVATE, as we don't even reveal their names.
Hope this helps clarify the situation.
-Stephen
US Census information/data is not opened to the public until 72 years after the census was taken. In Norway the census information is not opened to the public until 100 years after the census was taken.
What, if anything, distinguishes these things in security terms?
I didn't mean any online system. I meant I don't think existing genealogy websites (Any I know about, not only PGV) are as secure as, say, a good online banking system. As you point out, a good online shopping system with credit or debit card payment might be another, slightly weaker and easier point of comparison.
There is a risk of abetting identity theft and other crimes with insecure online family history. How does this compare with the level of risk involved with online banking or online shopping? Would you rather have the eavesdropper know your credit card information or your place and date of birth, mother's maiden name, and details of your personal history? A credit or debit card can be canceled and there may be ways to limit losses.
Some of the problem can be laid to banks and other trusted websites. Maiden names, etc., are not really secrets, they are just unusual pieces of information that rarely turn up and only close family members normally know. I would guess that most modern 2 or 3-factor authentication systems don't use these, so the most secure places are less at risk from family history information. My banking institutions are not that secure, they use only passwords with backup personal questions, but I wish they were. On the other hand I don't know that they've been directly breached, although I've had to change credit cards numbers several times.
If PGV can be secure enough for family history then a set of best practices must be developed. These should be the defaults. Hosting security, privacy settings, and user registration and acceptance rules are three areas of best practice. Are there more?
Ahhh, thank you okbigkid. Yeah, for sure I don't have anything visible to non-users on my system. I basically set it up where only registered users (i.e., family members) can view anything, and registration had to be activated by the admin (i.e., me) before they could even use it or log in or anything. All of that makes perfect sense for me. Maybe it'd been a long day…I was reading it like it was unconventional to actually have *anyone* current in your db :-)
Thanks for the clarification!