Genealogies document relationships between persons involved in historical events. Information about the events is parsed from communications from the past. This book explores a way to organize information from multiple communications into a trustworthy representation of a genealogical history of the modern world. The approach defines metrics for evaluating the consistency, correctness, closure, connectivity, completeness, and coherence of a genealogy. The metrics are evaluated using a 312,000-person research genealogy that explores the common ancestors of the royal families of Europe. A major result is that completeness is defined by a genealogy symmetry property driven by two exponential processes, the doubling of the number of potential ancestors each generation, and the rapid growth of lineage coalescence when the number of potential ancestors exceeds the available population. A genealogy expands from an initial root person to a large number of lineages, which then coalesce into a small number of progenitors. Using the research genealogy, candidate progenitors for persons of Western European descent are identified. A unifying ancestry is defined to which historically notable persons can be linked.

Autorentext

Reagan Moore is an emeritus professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Previously, he was Chief Scientist for Data Intensive Cyber Environments at the Renaissance Computing Institute, and Director of the Data Intensive Cyber Environments Center at UNC. He coordinated research efforts in the development of data grids, digital libraries, and preservation environments, including the integrated Rule Oriented Data System (iRODS). An ongoing research interest is use of data grid technology to automate execution of management policies and validate trustworthiness of repositories. Moore's previous roles include: Director of the DICE group at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and Manager of production services at SDSC. He also worked as a computational plasma physicist at General Atomics on equilibrium and stability of toroidal fusion devices. He has a Ph.D. in plasma physics from the University of California, San Diego (1978) and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (1967).