Tom's 2¢: FamilySearch Developer Conference Notes

I'll be adding some notes throughout the day...

Keynote
Ransom Love: “Brave New Platform: Changing the World of Genealogy”
http://devnet.familysearch.org/support/roadmap-for-new-developers (It's nice to see that FamilySearch is using plone)

Duane Kuehne: API Overview
They do not yet have load metrics on any of the API calls they outlined. They expect to have an SLA (service level agreement) with this information at some point. One thing that surprised the API dev team was the large size of individual records once you combine all the duplicates into a central location. Some individuals can be on the order of a hundred MB or more.

Ryan Heaton: Family Tree Read
REST-enabled
Resource Types: XML, JSON, can be gzipped
Resource Locations: Via ID or Identifying parameters
You can read a person/place by ID, name, etc, etc, etc.

Data Definition
XML Schema Location:
"{module}/{version}/schema"
https://api.familysearch.org/familytree/v1/schema

persons - contains data about a person
searches - contains data about searches
users - contains data about users
matches - contains data about matches
personas - contains data about a persona

person (nested in familytree/persons)

information (ids, gender, etc)
assertions (the data that makes up the person (names, events, facts,relationships, etc)
summary (most relevant name, gender, birth, death, spouse, and parents)
values (grouping assertions by value)
composition (a view of what persona make up this person)

search (nested in familytree/search)

this is different from the person data above
score (relative to other search elements)
ref (the id of the person)
person/parent/spouse

authorities

places
dates
names

Testing it out (you need to have an API key first):
https://api.familysearch.org/identity/v1/login?key=TEST_KEY

Get all data on a particular person using their id:
https://api.familysearch.org/identity/v1/person/KWCD-QBC?sessionId=...

Query for values and summary:
https://api.familysearch.org/identity/v1/person/KWCD-QBC?view=values&view=summary&sessionId=...

Get user data on a particular person:
https://api.familysearch.org/identity/v1/user/KWCD-QBC&sessionId=...

Get summary view of 2 generations of ancestors for a particular person
https://api.familysearch.org/identity/v1/person/KWCD-QBC?view=summary&ancestors=2&sessionId=...

Get JSON data for a particular person (not sure if I got this one right):
https://api.familysearch.org/identity/v1/person/KWCD-QBC?view=summary&dataFormat=application=json&sessionId=...

Matt Misbach (Bungee Labs): Rapid web client development/deployment

https://builder.bungeeconnect.com/
The buider IDE itself is a bungee application
No data management included, but this can plug into S3 (it runs on EC3).
The IDE will always be free to developers
Business model: it will eventually be billed based on a utility model (a combination of server memory footprint, bandwidth, and CPU). For this year (the beta period) it will be free.
Create an account and email your username to matt[at]bungeelabs[dot]com, then he'll invite you to his developer group with the bungee FamilySearch API.
treeseek.com is an example of what you can do with the FamilySearch API
WideLens is a more general example app that combines into a single calendar, SalesForce, GoogleCalendar, etc, etc.