My Family Lineage

My Family Lineage is a Semantic Wiki for publishing, researching, sharing and discovering family tree and other genealogy related information.

We use common vocabularies that relate to genealogy, including, but not limited to, FOAF, BIO - a vocabulary for describing biographic information as events, REL -a vocabulary for describing relationships, DC - Dublin Core and DCTERMS, GEDCOM X, DBpedia Ontology, Schema.org, OWL and SKOS. We have over 3 million facts defined on the site as of early July, 2012, including over 220 thousand pages, and over 87 thousand Persons.

Users can enter information using Semantic Forms and/or upload a GEDCOM file. Data is also stored in a triple store called Fuseki, in the Jena library. Data can also be accessed from a public SPARQL endpoint at: http:// futurewavehosting.com:3030/my-family-lineage/sparql. We link to several sites that are part of the Linked Open Data Cloud, making this an open linked data application which is part of the giant global graph.

There is a main form, "Person", for entering information about individuals; this form includes fields for Name, Gender, Spouse, Father, Mother, Descendents, Ancestors, Siblings, Children, Photo, Web pages and Biography. There is also a form for entering marriage information and there are forms for entering data for all events and facts ( most all) defined by the GEDCOM 5.5 Specification.

Through the use of a Perl script, we are able to import GEDCOM files and create many pages based on data in the GEDCOM that is being imported. A GEDCOM is a standard format used for recording and sharing genealogy information. Most software programs will let you export your family tree/genealogy information in GEDCOM format. This saves you from having to re-enter all that information.

Extensions used
Along with Semantic MediaWiki, other MediaWiki extensions used are Semantic Forms, Widgets, Maps, and ParserFunctions.

Vocabulary terms used
My Family Lineage makes use of the following vocabularies:
 * FOAF
 * BIO: A vocabulary for biographical Information
 * REL: A vocabulary for describing relationships between people
 * schema -the schema.org vocabulary
 * gx - GEDCOM X schema.
 * dbpo -DBpedia Ontology

These are defined in the wiki as external vocabularies, and related to existing properties in the wiki. The following properties from those vocabularies are used (this is just a small sample):


 * 1) foaf:Person
 * 2) bio:Father
 * 3) bio:Mother
 * 4) bio:Partner
 * 5) bio:place
 * dc:date
 * 1) foaf:firstName
 * 2) foaf:lastName
 * 3) foaf:gender
 * 4) foaf:page
 * 5) rdfs:seeAlso
 * 6) rel:ancestorOf
 * 7) rel:descendentOf
 * 8) rel:grandchildOf
 * 9) rel:parentOf
 * 10) rel:siblingOf
 * 11) rel:spouseOf