Has anyone ever noticed that this list tends to concentrate on hashing and re-hashing which OSS tools are best? Then, the discussion moves to whether client-server, webapps, or standalone apps are best. Next, we always jump on to (my favorite) legal issues. Goto line 1 and repeat...
I'd like to take a sideline from that and discuss problem solving issues -- just for a minute. I did some research for my family and came to a dead end. At that point, I sat in several libraries and read book after book. Eventually, place names and dates started to sound familiar. I started reading genealogies for unrelated people that lived in the same place/time as my family. Finally, I found families that had intermarried and surprisingly had clues for my own family. I've since been able to tie into some very old family lines. That will sound very familiar to most researchers as that is the way genealogy is often done. With all that we know about computers, algorithms, searching, data mining, etc., is there anything that we can do to affect the research process? To me, as a researcher, whether PAF is AJAX, C++, Python, is mainly a distraction. The only real requirement is that gen apps be available to everyone -- whether on the net or not. So, the discussion that I'd like to hear is not an Info Tech discussion, but a hardcore Computer Science one. Given the research paradigm that I described above, have you done anything that might allow researchers to data mine across databases and make inferences or suggestions to where to look when we get stumped? Thanks, Steve _______________________________________________ Ldsoss mailing list Ldsoss@lists.ldsoss.org http://lists.ldsoss.org/mailman/listinfo/ldsoss
