Structured data on genealogy websites
In my previous post, I listed several problems with publishing and using genealogy data on the Web. In short, the issues are:
- it should be easier to copy data from Web resources to a researcher’s database
- data on the Web may be ambiguous
- good links to sources should be provided where possible
- software could exist to help with the above
Before we can try to figure out what solutions are viable, let’s see what the current state of genealogy websites is. What I wanted to do is to take some websites that contain information interesting for genealogists and assess them in terms of how easy it is to collect data from them in an automatic and unambiguous way and also be able to link back to the site as the source of information.