John said...

Joel,

Any chance you folks will be heading down the Central Coast of California? If you could put something together in between San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara that would be great! I’d even be willing to drive south to Simi Valley or Thousand Oaks. Thanks!

John

March 19, 2007 7:51 pm #

Kathryn Grant said...

Terrific! We’re glad you’re coming. I’ve let several of my friends in the area know.

I just wish I could register for more than two of the breakout sessions!!

April 6, 2007 12:12 pm #

Joel Dehlin: Tech Talk in Mountain View said...

[…] a reminder that we’re having a tech talk in Mountain View, CA. If you have time, head over to the lds tech site and register so we know how […]

April 19, 2007 8:25 pm #

Vic Walker said...

Hi folks. I’m Vic Walker, a new user on this web site, but someone who has been combining computers and genealogy with the Church for some time now.

I attended a meeting at my work the other day, where I saw a presentation on an artificial intelligence application that was designed to combine data from various databases to identify people. The system used various rules to assign scores as to the likelihood of person A being the same as person B. For example, if I have records for Robert Jones, Robert A. Jones, Robert Anson Jones, Robert A. Jones Jr., Bob Jones, Bobby Jones, Rob Jones and Robbie Jones, they may or may not be the same person. But if I knew that some of them had the same social security number, or address, or phone number, it is more likely that they are indeed for the same person. By combining data in various databases, it’s possible to get very plausible matches between records.

Now, the application I saw was designed to identify potential health insurance fraud by providers and patients, but as I was watching this presentation, I was thinking to myself, “If we applied this kind of technology to the massive database of records that is being scanned, digitized and indexed from the Church’s Granite Mountain archive, we could build a family tree that stretches back to Adam!”

My question is, is anyone thinking about applying this kind of technology to the Church’s existing and future databases? And is this something we could discuss at the upcoming Tech Talk in Mountain View next week?

What do you think?

Thanks.

Vic

p.s. This is a cross-posting from elsewhere on this website. Sorry, I should have posted here first. vw

April 21, 2007 9:20 am #