Hi Dan, thanks your message, and apologies for the delay in replying.
History Research Environment (HRE) [1] is a community project to create
a free platform-independent application for the serious amateur or
professional historical researcher. The proposed software will be
primarily focused on genealogical research, including researchers who
are currently reliant upon the now-discontinued program The Master
Genealogist (TMG) [2]. In addition, HRE is planned to handle a very
wide range of other historical and cultural research needs [3].
With the demise of TMG in 2014 the genealogical community lost its last
high-end product for the serious researcher. Stand-alone genealogical
software packages are no longer commercially viable, and the commercial
market has moved almost entirely to online products sold as part of a
subscription to large family history websites. This is advantageous for
the service provider, as it allows them to monetise your family history
data, but many serious researchers lament the loss of the control,
feature richness, and personal privacy that a stand-alone product can
provide.
The plan is to create a high-end product that can be run on a user's own
computer, with its own integrated database. This allows the user to
retain full control over their own research data without interference
from outside commercial organisations. The features to be provided will
be decided collaboratively by the community, and they will certainly
include comprehensive mechanisms for recording the sources of each item
of data within the database, and for documenting the researcher’s
conclusions about data items and linkages between data items. The
ability to record reliable sources and conclusions for both data items
and linkages is, we believe, and a central component of any serious
genealogy database, a component that is missing from most of the
commercial online systems that are now available.
As a Wikimedian myself for many years (and currently chair of Wikimedia
UK) I do see quite a few similarities in approach between the HRE
project and the approach of the wiki communities. How any connections
might work would be a matter of discussion, but I can say that the HRE
community would be more than open to collaboration. Obvious
possibilities would be for the HRE database to store Wikidata IDs to
allow unambiguous matching of data items – not only for the people
within a family tree but also for such things as location data, time
periods, titles, occupations, relationships, and so on.
Armed with such matches, HRE researchers could leverage the power of
Wikidata to download or perhaps merely to view a whole range of
historical information about the primary individuals within the
database. Similarly, with appropriate agreement from the Wikidata
community, HRE researchers could have the possibility of uploading to
Wikidata those portions of their research which are sufficiently
interesting (“notable”?), along with full details of the sources relied
upon.
We would clearly need to discuss how to handle data relating to living
individuals, which might need to be kept confidential, and also to
develop rules for the reliability of sources to make it clear that users
can't simply upload personal family trees based on random information
they have found on the Internet or which have been copied from the
unreliable family trees that are often found at places such as
Ancestry.com.
I hope provides useful information for further discussions, either here
or on wiki.
All the best
Michael
__________
[1] https://historyresearchenvironment.org/
[2]
https://historyresearchenvironment.org/hre-for-users-of-the-master-genealogist/
[3]
https://historyresearchenvironment.org/hre-for-historical-and-social-researchers/
Dan Koehl <mailto:dan.ko...@gmail.com>
30 May 2017 at 12:11 am
Dear Michael, thanks again for your question and request. I hope that
more members of this list will share their thoughts about this.
I guess no one on the list were so ready for this kind of question, we
have sort of moved slowly towards a moment when we think we are so
many that we can start to look into next step, so far we were just
discussing and discussing.
Your question is interesting relevant, and should have had a much
better feedback, than those weeks without even an answer.
Lets bring your request a further step, so we can soon move it to the
meta pages, and discuss openly.
I have to admit, I was not totally sure about your question, and maybe
this goes for others, would you mind tell us more about your plans
with this and anything more you want to share. It sounds like a tool,
connected to Wikidata, which already sounds very good for a Wikimedia
genealogy tool. you may actually turn up with your request in the
perfect moment, where technical issues needs to be discussed, we were
simply not there, but I guess that the group members will just
consider each and every step towards the vision of a wikimedia
genealogy website as positive, why your question may actually push us
all into next step..
Please fill us in a bit more, and keep in mind, that most users on the
list are not programmers, why technical details, may be needed to be
presented in an easy way to understand.
I will be excited to get some input from you all on this list, as well
as weather we need to wait more, or should go to next step, and start
to creat the user group, in order to contact the wikimedia for further
questions to move on with the project.
Dan Koehl
Michael Maggs <mailto:mich...@maggs.name>
24 May 2017 at 3:58 pm
There has been quite bit of discussion over the years about how the
Wikimedia movement could engage with those who have research interests
in family history or genealogy, and a centralised discussion page [1]
has been set up on Meta.
I am posting to ask whether there would be Wikimedian developers who
would be interested in joining an open source project to create a free
platform independent application called History Research Environment
[2] (‘HRE’) for the serious genealogist or historical researcher.
Considerable effort has been put into high-level planning over several
years, and we are now ready to start writing code.
While the proposed software is not currently an official Wikimedia
project, if there is enough interest we are open to it becoming
integrated or affiliated in some way. The plan is, in any event, that
the software should be interoperable with Wikidata to allow (subject
to the agreement of the Wikidata community) the exchange of a variety
of structured data including verified and fully sourced family trees.
I'd be happy to answer queries.
Michael Maggs
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_genealogy_project
[2] https://historyresearchenvironment.org
(please excuse cross-posting for greater visibility, as the
[wikimedia-genealogy] mailing list still has very few subscribers)
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