Hi, I looked at werelate.org and it looks pretty great. I also looked at your personal website, and it sounds like you've done some cool stuff. I've been wanting create a search engine like this for about six months now but have been to occupied with other things. What langugage did you use to write search engine? What kind of technology do you use? I was thinking that a Named Entity Recognizer would be quite useful.
I have a masters degree in Computational Linguistics. Can I help out with the search engine. The reason I wanted to write a search engine is that I've noticed a lot of local historical societies and genealogical societies have tiny repositories of local records that volunteers have entered into the computer. It would be nice to index all of these and add it to a search engine. The formats I've seen have been Word, Excel, text files, and PDF. These are great resources, but quite difficult to find. Here's one example:
Anyhow, thanks for all the work you've put into this website.
Jay Askren
On 2/10/06, Dallan Quass <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hello,
I just launched a website for genealogy - www.werelate.org . It is part
search engine and part wiki. The overall goal is to help people discover
and share information about their ancestors online. The website is in what
I would call an "alpha" state right now, meaning there is some fine tuning
needed on the look and feel and I'm sure there are a number of bugs, but it
is to the point where I'm interested in criticisms of the ideas, suggestions
for new features, bug reports, etc. It's sponsored by the Foundation for
On-Line Genealogy, a not-for-profit organization I co-founded earlier this
year. It's all open source, both content and software.
If you decide to look at it, please don't edit any pages yet (or more
specifically, don't expect your edits to "stick"). I'm soliciting feedback
during the coming weeks on systemic problems with the data, at which point
I'll fix them and reload.
If anyone is interested, I'd love to get feedback on how the website could
be improved. Help on creating/editing content or development and
administration would also be appreciated. I started working on this at the
beginning of last year because I wanted to do something interesting and help
out in the area of genealogy. I don't expect to ever get a salary from it.
The website is composed of four major sections:
(1) Search: search genealogy-relevant web pages for names, places, and
keywords. You can elect to include related names in your search, which
causes searches on John Smith for example to return pages containing
Jonathan Smythe. The index currently includes about 5M pages, but that
number will increase over time. The ultimate goal for search is to point
people to information regardless of its location, whether on static web
pages, behind forms, or in offline books and microfilms.
(2) Names: this section lists related names and possible misspellings for
given and surnames. It has been created using a combination of manual data
entry and a weighted-edit-distance algorithm. As far as I know it is the
largest such list publically available.
(3) Places: this section contains what I believe is the largest database of
historic places currently available online. It integrates data from
Wikipedia, the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names, and the Family History
Library Catalog. It currently has places for North and South America,
Europe, and Australia/NZ. Africa, Asia, and the rest of Oceania should be
up soon.
(4) Resources: this section lists websites and microfilms that are relevant
to genealogy. Currently it includes about 400K websites and online message
boards that we've come across and roughly 1M microfilms from the LDS Church.
Search (section 1) performs searches over the pages on these resources.
Sections 2-4 are wiki's, with the idea that people can improve them over
time. I'm hoping to get feedback over the next several months on how to
make the website more helpful.
-dallan
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