I. Zandhuis
Genealogy is a very popular usage of the World Wide Web. People from all over the world can investigate their ancestry by searching databases and publish their genealogy themselves through a home-made website. The information on these platforms however is not structured to facilitate intelligent cross-platform search.
On the other hand computing scientists are introduced into the field of artificial intelligence by examples in family constructions. The Semantic Web combines the insights in Artificial Intelligence with the possibilities of internet. Therefore a useful demonstrator of the Semantic Web could be the automatic construction of genealogies.
The first step towards such a demonstrator is to develop an ontology for the Semantic Web to encode genealogical information. In this paper existing standards are investigated, the choice for the Semantic Web is argued, a possible ontology is introduced and the possible usages in the future are explored.
The most important aspects of the ontology introduced are (1) the possibility to model the relationship with the source from which the information is obtained, (2) the possibility to model the relationship with the agent responsible for the information and (3) the abstraction from nomenclature and time-representation in various cultures.
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