Jeni's Musings

Hi Jenny. really Interesting topic! I’ve started playing around with GEDCOM exports from popular family history sites lately, and wondering along similar lines how to reflect out uncertainties in RDF. The biggest change in the RDF universe since I last looked into this is the standardisation of “named graph” stuff within SPARQL, allowing us to talk about properties of sets of triples, and even construct queries that mix across these two layers, eg. “find me birthdates for parents of the person who is primary topic of document x, according to sources with a quality of 4 or more” kinda thing. Do you have any RDFS/OWL or instance data samples, which could be basis for trying out test cases in SPARQL using such a technique?

Data privacy in this area is also going to be interesting. By which I mean, hard. I was chatting with a cab driver a few weeks ago, who initially claimed to be barely capable of sending a text message, then revealed that he’s a wizard with these family history sites. He was telling me that, after some investigation, you end up realising quite private secrets of families from the other side of the world. It’s far from clear how automation will interact with all that. Some of these sites now have adverts for dna-based services too, which reminds me that I put foaf:dna_checksum into FOAF some years ago, largely as a (slightly grim) joke. But now it’s rather topical. As far as I know there’s no cross-site interchange format for the bio data, although presumably things are happening in the govt-to-govt world (passports etc).