kbaker May 16th, 2008
There are many technologies and gadgets I like. But one of the most fascinating to me is Global Positioning. I’m still amazed by the fact that Global Position Systems (GPS) work, and work as well as they do. Maybe its my love of clocks and timepieces, maybe its the thought of receiving messages from a satellite orbiting the earth. Whatever it is, I love GPS.
But what is it good for? There are many, many uses for a GPS and I hope to be able to get into some of them in future posts. But the first thing I did when I bought my GPS was I used it to determine the latitude and longitude of some special places and locations. Using the GPS I recorded the lat/long of the grave sites of my ancestors and added the location data to the genealogical information I already had about them.
Now the lat/long coordinates given by a GPS are on average accurate to about 20 feet. On a good day I’ve gotten the accuracy down to around 8 feet. So armed with the lat/long from my notes and a few digital pictures of the area, any one of my children or grandchildren could easily find the grave site of my great-grandfather. This offers a great way to enable family and friends to find important personal landmarks.
And I don’t believe GPS is going away any time soon. Many industries use GPS as part of their daily operations. Even the new flight control systems in development today will use GPS information as their primary way of knowing where the planes are in the sky.
A GPS is not for everyone. It’s a fun gadget with few uses in your daily routine. But as GPS enabled phones and cameras become commonplace, you will have more opportunities to take advantage of this new type of information.
David May 9th, 2008
From Jimmy Zimmerman, FamilySearch Developer Support, comes the relaunch of the FamilySearch DevNet site http://devnet.familysearch.org. This site will be used by developers who intend to use the FamilySearch API to create web sites and software. These APIs permit 3rd party tools to search, update, and insert records in the new FamilySearch database.
The content has been reorganized, which should help you find content faster.
FAQs are beginning to populate, so you can find answers to common questions on that tab.
The Events tab now has a page "All Recorded Presentations" which will link to all of the public, recorded presentations. Now you can access all recordings from one place without having to dig through past events.
The Downloads tab has an area for third-party software. Project owners will be given rights to manage their own page for their project. If you have a project that you would like to have posted here, please email devnet@familysearch.org.
We are putting an end to the life of the Basic Client. We will provide how-to articles for using tools like Poster. We may still post the source to the Basic Client on the site, but we will no longer be supporting it.
If you experience any problems with the new site, or find any broken links, please email devnet@familysearch.org.
I have been using PhpGedView for my family genealogy site, which should have new FamilySearch integration with the next major release of the software. I haven’t been using these APIs yet myself, but I am interested in doing so.
David March 26th, 2008
Lindon, Utah based Footnote launched January 2007 and has grown to become a favorite resource for avid genealogists. What makes them different from other sites like Ancestry or WorldVitalRecords is it’s expanded resources beyond traditional records. For example,
Footnote has taken the initiative to digitize all 58,000 names inscribed into the Vietnam War Memorial. It has also correlated them with military personnel records from the National Archives and made this information searchable from within an interactive Flash application.
It is the extra steps that they have taken from public data which we already had access to, but correlating it and indexing it that makes this a unique resource.
David March 13th, 2008
I attended the first annual FamilySearch Developers Conference in Provo, Utah yesterday at the BYU Conference Center. The FamilySearch Webservices team and 3rd party developers presented the basics of utilizing the API as well as examples and initial product offerings which will incorporate this functionality. It is my opinion that this will affect the entire genealogy research industry as much as the introduction of the GEDCOM standard did back in the 1980’s. Where the industry has made incremental improvements for researchers, the New FamilySearch (NFS) will change the way that genealogy is researched.
Although I haven’t developed an application using these resources prior to this conference, I have enrolled on the development site at http://devnet.familysearch.org and have reviewed the documentation.
Here are the sessions which I attended:
- Keynote - “Brave New Platform: Changing the World of Genealogy”, Ransom Love, director of strategic relationship, FamilySearch (LDS Church)
- “Family Tree, Authorities, Ordinance Reservation, Common Identity, and Future Opportunities”, Gordon Clarke, API and Third-Party Program Manager, FamilySearch (LDS Church)
- “GedLink”, John Finlay, professor at Neumont University and open source creator of PhpGedview.
- “PAFSDK”, Gaylon Findlay, creator of Ancestral Quest and PAF 4.0/5.0
- “PHP NFS Library”, John Finlay, professor at Neumont University and open source creator of PhpGedview.
- “Bungee Labs web framework”, Matt Misbach, BungeeConnect.com
- “FamilyTree Combine/Separate”, Rob Lyon, FamilySearch Web Services API Team Lead, FamilySearch (LDS Church)
- “Record Search”, Tim Crabb & Robert Lee, FamilySearch (LDS Church)