[Edu-sig] Genealogy in Python

[Douglas S. Blank]

Edu-sig,

There is a genealogy project that has been going on for awhile that you 
may be familiar with called Gramps. They have done some very fine work 
over the years building a nice application in gtk/gnome/python. I have a 
proposal with them that I am mentioning over here for a couple of reasons.

First, I'm thinking that having real family tree data handy for each 
student would be a great resource for CS homework. For example, all of 
the standard tree-based algorithms could be explored in the family tree 
domain. Are two people related? Is person1 an ancestor of person2? etc. 
Other problems become concrete: which of your relatives were alive in 
1900? How old were they? (That last one is trickier than you might 
guess, especially with incomplete data).

(Not every person will have access to their family's data, but alternate 
trees can be used in that case. Large trees could also be used for 
seeing Big-Oh in action.)

Secondly, part of the proposal is to make Gramps a bit more accessible 
by reducing the software requirements (by making ncurses or Tkinter 
interfaces), and by making the code have easy-to-pickup Pythonic methods.

The questions: would you, or someone you know be interested in working 
on the project? If you teach, would this be a resource that you could 
use? If you are interested in genealogy, would you be interested in (or 
are you) using Gramps?

Thanks!

-Doug

-- 
Douglas S. Blank,         Assistant Professor
dblank at brynmawr.edu,            (610)526-6501
Bryn Mawr College,   Computer Science Program
101 North Merion Ave,       Park Science Bld.
Bryn Mawr, PA 19010  dangermouse.brynmawr.edu