Best public website/API for mining names and relationships?

[Ben Brumfield]

Some of the twitter around Douglas Kennard's FHT09 presentation ("Word-
Spotting for Automatic Tag Suggestion in the BYU Historic Journals
Project") has got me thinking about mining genealogy sites for names
that occur within a text.

In particular, I'd like to programmatically search for people matching
name X, who would have been alive in date Y in location Z. After
identifying that person, I'd also want to traverse their siblings,
children, aunts and uncles for suggested matches to other names within
the text.

Does anyone have recommendations for open websites or APIs for pulling
this sort of data from? (I've investigated the FamilySearch API, but
the TOS bars users who are not members of the LDS church).

Relevant tweets:
http://twitter.com/danhanks/statuses/1316547238
http://twitter.com/danhanks/statuses/1316508098
http://twitter.com/danhanks/statuses/1316779811

More information about Douglas Kennard's project should be presented
at JCDL 2009.

-Ben

[jimmy zimmerman]

Hi Ben,

I'm unaware of any other APIs that are open at this time. I'd be excited to try out new APIs if anyone knows about any.

Currently, the FamilySearch API is only available to members of the LDS church, but that will not always be the case. I'm anxiously awaiting the time when it will be open to the entire world, but FamilySearch engineers are working through some things before the "New FamilySearch" application/API can be released worldwide.

You may want to watch for the FamilySearch RecordSearch API to become available later this year. It will give waypoints and searchability to a large amount of record collections. When it is released, it will be available to the general public. You can learn more about it from the FamilySearch Developers Conference recorded presentations (in case you weren't able to attend that conference).
http://tr.im/hKoL

--
Jimmy Z

--
Jimmy Zimmerman
http://jimmyzimmerman.com

[Ben Brumfield]

Thank you very much for the link! I'll look for the RecordSearch API
to become GA -- I didn't know that that was in the works.

Your evaluation of API availability matches my own -- it's
FamilySearch or nothing right now. I'm not above building a few
HPricot scripts, however, and will let you know what I come up with.

-Ben

On Mar 30, 9:37 pm, jimmy zimmerman <jimmy.zimmer...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Ben,
>
> I'm unaware of any other APIs that are open at this time. I'd be excited to
> try out new APIs if anyone knows about any.
>
> Currently, the FamilySearch API is only available to members of the LDS
> church, but that will not always be the case. I'm anxiously awaiting the
> time when it will be open to the entire world, but FamilySearch engineers
> are working through some things before the "New FamilySearch"
> application/API can be released worldwide.
>
> You may want to watch for the FamilySearch RecordSearch API to become
> available later this year. It will give waypoints and searchability to a
> large amount of record collections. When it is released, it will be
> available to the general public. You can learn more about it from the
> FamilySearch Developers Conference recorded presentations (in case you

> weren't able to attend that conference).http://tr.im/hKoL

[jimmy zimmerman]

Hi Ben,

So it sounds like you are also a Ruby developer. I'm in the process of writing some API wrappers for upcoming and current FamilySearch APIs. I'm using HappyMapper w/ libxml-ruby for the xml parsing/creation. If you're interested, check out my github projects:

http://github.com/jimmyz/
(fs-communicator, and fs-familytree-v1). I'm planning an fs-recordsearch-v1 when it becomes available.

The code is pretty simple if you would to contribute at some point.

I have an older project that wraps the current New FamilySearch APIs pretty well, but is not packaged as a gem. It is located here:
http://ruby-fs-api.googlecode.com

Check the same recorded presentations page for a link to my presentation at the FamilySearch Developers Conference.

--
Jimmy Z