Modeling genealogical domain: an open problem

Abstract

The automated processing, storing and knowledge inference of genealogical data presents several difficulties. Roughly eighteen years ago, the FamilySearch organization published GEDCOM, a new standard file format to allow genealogy software and tools to exchange genealogical data. Five years later, the GENTECH Data Modeling Project, proposed a new genealogical logic data model to support research in genealogy and to allow data inter-exchange between genealogy software. Despite being initial reference models, they still have some limitations to adapt to different cultural and social environments. Additionally, sharing genealogical data between systems is difficult since, even though they are syntactical reference models, they may have semantic mismatches. Today, we have not a common and unified proposal as a standard recognized genealogical model. In this way, in this paper we propose to consider the ontology paradigm to extend expressiveness of concepts and relationships in such standards.