Re: genealogical data (What work is being done using RDF?)

* B. Cookson
| 
| RDF seems like a perfect fit for genealogical data (Family
| Histories, etc.) .  What work is being done using RDF and specific
| schemas using RDFS/DAML, etc.

I've done some experiments with this, which basically involved
creating a GEDCOM parser that produced RDF from GEDCOM files.  This
RDF followed the original GEDCOM data model pretty closely, and used a
schema I created.

My goal was to create a topic map of the data. Originally I did this
directly (that is GEDCOM -> TM) in one step, but I quickly realized
that most GEDCOM files have more structure inside the various fields
that one may want to mine.

So my current approach is GEDCOM -> RDF, chew and mine RDF, RDF -> TM.
This works pretty well.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure I can release this, as it's done as part
of closed-source product development. The RDF schema is pretty
straightforward, though. Just look at the GEDCOM format documentation
and you can more or less recreate it directly.

I also looked around before starting on my own RDF schema to see if
anyone else had done RDF schemas for genealogical information, but
couldn't find any.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
ISO SC34/WG3, OASIS GeoLang TC        <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >

Received on Friday, 3 May 2002 17:14:32 UTC