Tom Caswell

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  • Moving my blog to tomcaswell.com/blog

    I have decided to move my main blog over to tomcaswell.com/blog. That means everyone who has been following my blog may want to change your feed readers to point the new blog location. All three of you. Part of the reason is because I want to use WordPress so I can have a bit more control over my blog. The other reason is that I was starting to get some Google pagerank on this blog and frankly, I would rather keep my blog obscure so I don’t have to worry as much about anyone reading what I write 🙂

  • Letting my Flickr photos wander…

    I’ve been having a lot of fun with Flickr lately. I like seeing the different ways my photos get reused. From Wikipedia to Schmap.com to an online women’s magazine. Just for fun, I have added a “reused” tag to each of the photos I know has been reused somewhere. Here’s what I have so far: http://flickr.com/photos/caswell_tom/tags/reused/

    This is all just anecdotal, but it seems people really started reusing my photos around the same time I changed all 1500+ of them over to an Attribution-only Creative Commons license. It could be that more and more Flickr users are enjoying the same kind of content reuse fame and glory regardless of what license they choose. But I think it has something to do with my willingness to open up my CC license by only asking for attribution without adding a bunch of other conditions that make reusers nervous. The truth is I really don’t care if people use my photos commercially. In fact, I think it’s kind of neat to see what happens with them. In a way they take on a life of their own. And you never know where they will end up.

  • Rapid web client development/deployment with Bungee Builder

    From the FamilySearch Conference:
    (but it deserves its own post)
    Matt Misbach     (Bungee Labs): Rapid web client development/deployment

    • https://builder.bungeeconnect.com/
    • The buider IDE itself is a bungee application
    • No data management included, but this can plug into S3 (it runs on EC3).
    • The IDE will always be free to developers
    • Business model: it will eventually be billed based on a utility model (a combination of server memory footprint, bandwidth, and CPU). For this year (the beta period) it will be free.
    • Create an account and email your username to matt[at]bungeelabs[dot]com, then he’ll invite you to his developer group with the bungee FamilySearch API.
    • treeseek.com is an example of what you can do with the FamilySearch API
    • WideLens is a more general example app that combines into a single calendar, SalesForce, GoogleCalendar, etc, etc.

  • FamilySearch Developer Conference Notes

    I’ll be adding some notes throughout the day…

    Keynote
    Ransom Love: “Brave New Platform: Changing the World of Genealogy”
    http://devnet.familysearch.org/support/roadmap-for-new-developers (It’s nice to see that FamilySearch is using plone)

    Duane Kuehne: API Overview
    They do not yet have load metrics on any of the API calls they outlined. They expect to have an SLA (service level agreement) with this information at some point. One thing that surprised the API dev team was the large size of individual records once you combine all the duplicates into a central location. Some individuals can be on the order of a hundred MB or more.


    Ryan Heaton: Family Tree Read
    REST-enabled
    Resource Types: XML, JSON, can be gzipped
    Resource Locations: Via ID or Identifying parameters
    You can read a person/place by ID, name, etc, etc, etc.

    Data Definition
    XML Schema Location:
    “{module}/{version}/schema”
    https://api.familysearch.org/familytree/v1/schema

    persons – contains data about a person
    searches – contains data about searches
    users – contains data about users
    matches – contains data about matches
    personas – contains data about a persona

    person (nested in familytree/persons)

    • information (ids, gender, etc)
    • assertions (the data that makes up the person (names, events, facts,relationships, etc)
    • summary (most relevant name, gender, birth, death, spouse, and parents)
    • values (grouping assertions by value)
    • composition (a view of what persona make up this person)

    search (nested in familytree/search)

    • this is different from the person data above
    • score (relative to other search elements)
    • ref (the id of the person)
    • person/parent/spouse

    authorities

    • places
    • dates
    • names

    Testing it out (you need to have an API key first):
    https://api.familysearch.org/identity/v1/login?key=TEST_KEY

    Get all data on a particular person using their id:
    https://api.familysearch.org/identity/v1/person/KWCD-QBC?sessionId=…

    Query for values and summary:
    https://api.familysearch.org/identity/v1/person/KWCD-QBC?view=values&view=summary&sessionId=…

    Get user data on a particular person:
    https://api.familysearch.org/identity/v1/user/KWCD-QBC&sessionId=…

    Get summary view of 2 generations of ancestors for a particular person
    https://api.familysearch.org/identity/v1/person/KWCD-QBC?view=summary&ancestors=2&sessionId=…

    Get JSON data for a particular person (not sure if I got this one right):
    https://api.familysearch.org/identity/v1/person/KWCD-QBC?view=summary&dataFormat=application=json&sessionId=…


    Matt Misbach     (Bungee Labs): Rapid web client development/deployment

    • https://builder.bungeeconnect.com/
    • The buider IDE itself is a bungee application
    • No data management included, but this can plug into S3 (it runs on EC3).
    • The IDE will always be free to developers
    • Business model: it will eventually be billed based on a utility model (a combination of server memory footprint, bandwidth, and CPU). For this year (the beta period) it will be free.
    • Create an account and email your username to matt[at]bungeelabs[dot]com, then he’ll invite you to his developer group with the bungee FamilySearch API.
    • treeseek.com is an example of what you can do with the FamilySearch API
    • WideLens is a more general example app that combines into a single calendar, SalesForce, GoogleCalendar, etc, etc.


    Rob Lyon: FamilyTree Combine/Separate
    Tree cleaning (removing duplicates) – someone needs to develop an app to handle this better.

  • A pub and a baptism…

    This has been a great week! Earlier this week I got my first “pub.” An article I wrote with Shelley Henson Johnson, Marion Jensen, and David Wiley was published in The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. It is called, “Open Educational Resources: Enabling Universal Education,” and is available online. When the editor of the journal wrote me to tell me our article had been accepted, she called me Professor Caswell. That was weird! I think I’ll just go by Tom, even after I graduate.

    The other great thing that happened this weekend was my son Jordan’s baptism. Even though the snowy weather made it hard for some family to come, it was a special day. I’ll get some pics up on my flickr page soon.