Family History Information Standards Organisation Luther - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Family History Information Standards Organisation

Luther Tychonievich FHISO’s Technical Standing Committee Coordinator

Once Upon a Time

Someone exported a .ged file from a genealogy tool, gave it to a friend who imported it into another* tool, and found that the data arrived all messed up.

*It might have been another instance of the same tool…

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BetterGEDCOM

These two talked to a third friend and started a wiki called BetterGEDCOM. More people got involved, and many ideas were shared. But people disagreed and no consensus was forthcoming. BetterGEDCOM lacked the structure to define a new standard.

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FHISO Born (2012–early 2013)

They decided to make an organisation that could get things done. They talked to lots of companies and got buy-in from many. They incorporated as a non-profit and wrote by-laws. They appointed a board. They put

• ut a Call for Papers.

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FHISO Stalls

Life got in the way for some of the initial group of FHISO organisers. Illness, loss of employment, and other personal issues meant FHISO lost momentum.

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FHISO Wakes Up (Summer 2014)

I was appointed as the new Coordinator

• f the Technical Standing Committee, with

Richard Smith as co-coordinator.

• We produced a Charter and an Operations

and Policy Manual

• We created mailing lists: tsc-public,

tsc-announce, and others

• Volunteers appeared; work has begun

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Technical Process Overview

• Ideas can come from anywhere
• Exploratory Groups define the scope and

context of work on an idea

• Project Teams produce proposed standards
• Proposed standards are voted on by all

FHISO members

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Current Exploratory Groups

• Core Concepts – documenting existing

tools’ approaches to persons, properties, events, and relationships

• Lexicon – documenting words we use in the

intersection of software and genealogy

(An informal Bibliography effort is also ongoing)

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Future Exploratory Groups

• The following have been proposed but lack

the necessary number of volunteers:

• Sources and Citations (1 volunteer so far)
• Modularisation (no volunteers)
• Data Formalism (no volunteers)
• There are many other ideas: calenders,

personal names, place names, microdata, metadata, inference data, research logs, automation, query languages, archivability…

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Likely Future

• Goal: a sustainable, careful pace.

We don’t make deadlines for ourselves.

• Goals for this year:
• Re-engage member organisations
• Possibly start a third Exploratory Group
• First Project Team: probably a year away
• First standard: probably several years away
• We have enough work to last for decades

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Involvement

• We seek to build consensus around

proposed standards

• That means listening to others
• …which means moving slowly
• We are all volunteers, always welcome

more, and will focus on whatever topics our members want to pursue

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Questions?

http://fhiso.org tsc@fhiso.org ltychonievich@fhiso.org

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