Historical Data Record Clustering for Non-Familial Relationship Mapping
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing genealogical research services and social networking platforms fail to provide insights into historical communities and relationships of ancestors, limiting the understanding of how ancestors were influenced by or participated in communities such as military units, religious congregations, neighborhoods, or professional organizations, and how they interacted with other members.
Innovation Solution
A computer-implemented method that normalizes genealogical records, stitches them into clusters corresponding to individuals, identifies life-event records indicating non-familial relationships, and generates a graphical user interface to display a historical network, utilizing databases like Elasticsearch and graph databases to represent these relationships.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of information
If genealogical records are normalized and stitched into clusters to identify historical relationships, then the understanding of historical communities and non-familial relationships is improved, but the system complexity and data processing requirements increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the complex task of historical relationship analysis into distinct processing stages: normalization of individual records, stitching/merging of normalized records into clusters, identification of life-event records, and generation of historical network visualizations. This segmentation allows each stage to be optimized independently while managing overall system complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces intermediate data structures including normalized genealogical records as a intermediary format between raw historical data and final relationship insights. These intermediaries standardize diverse historical records into a common format, facilitating subsequent analysis without requiring direct complex processing of heterogeneous source data.
2Loss of information
If life-event records are identified to determine non-familial relationships, then the contextual understanding of ancestors' lives is improved, but the data processing time and computational resources increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent performs preliminary normalization of genealogical records before the actual relationship analysis. By pre-processing and standardizing records into a uniform format during the normalization stage, the system reduces the computational burden during subsequent life-event identification and relationship analysis, thereby reducing overall processing time.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent extracts and isolates specific life-event records from the broader set of genealogical data. By identifying and separating records that indicate non-familial relationships (such as military service, employment, or residence records) from family connection records, the system focuses computational resources on relevant data, improving efficiency.
3Ease of operation
If historical networks are generated and displayed through graphical user interface, then the accessibility and understanding of historical relationships is improved, but the system resource requirements and processing load increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent generates simplified visual representations (copies) of complex historical relationship data through graphical user interface displays. Instead of presenting raw data or complex relationship structures directly to users, the system creates visual copies such as network graphs and organized displays that convey relationship information in an accessible format while reducing the computational burden of direct data manipulation.
Data Source
AI summary
A computing server may receive genealogical records that include historical records of deceased individuals. The computing server may normalize the genealogical records into normalized genealogical records. Normalizing the genealogical records may include converting a text string of a genealogical record into a standardized format. The computing server may stitch the normalized genealogical records into a plurality of clusters. Each cluster corresponds to an individual and includes one or more genealogical records associated with the individual. The computing server may identify a life-event record that is commonly associated with a subset of clusters, the life-event record indicating that a plurality of deceased individuals are connected through a non-familial relationship in a life event documented by the life-event record. The computing server may cause a graphical user interface to display a representation of a historical network among the plurality of deceased individuals that are connected through the non-familial relationship.