Okay, so this is pretty cool. For the last couple of years, I’ve been working for the Family and Church History department of the LDS Church. We’ve been working on a set of massive genealogical projects, aiming at putting huge piles of data into the hands of researchers everywhere, and making collaboration on genealogical work vastly easier. Yesterday, my department made another major announcement.
This time, instead of news about indexing data and calls for volunteers, we’re announcing a conference aimed at Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, Java, and other developers. To me, the most exciting bit of news in the press release is:
The newly released FamilySearch Family Tree API and soon-to-be-released Record Search API will be main topics of discussion.
These APIs provide access to billions of records. I’ve had a chance to play a bit with Ruby libraries for accessing the APIs, and I’m excited to see these get more publicity. I can’t wait to see the kinds of tools people start building with them.
The conference itself will be held on March 12th, and online registration is available.
You may be interested in knowing that genetree.com is a Ruby on Rails site that is involved with FamilySearch. For geneology buffs, we'd love to have you on the site giving feedback. If you have some questions/feedback about it, feel free to send me an email at jdeville at sorensonmedia.com or jredville at jredville.com
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