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New Standards Data Catalog Now Available!

26 Feb 2009 by Mark Ward

After an almost 4 year hiatus, we are proud to announce the publish of a new Standards data catalog for your use on Standard Finder.  It incorporates many years of correction to the existing data which many of you have so diligently emailed us about, as well as expanded and new gazetteers for better global coverage.  As always, it’s not perfect, but has made tremendous advancement.  Please continue to send us your comments as our goal is to continually improve the data and increase the publish frequency to a quarterly basis moving forward.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 3:26 pm and is filed under Standard Finder. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to “New Standards Data Catalog Now Available!”

  1. Bill Buchanan Says:
    February 27th, 2009 at 8:48 pm

    The Family Tree is coming along nicely but the Standard Finder is not.

    Needed Repairs Dept:

    The error in the Standard Place Finder algorithm still exists. It needs to be fixed. Try finding the standard place for “Tupper District, Manitoba, Canada”. See if it still chooses “Tupper, British Columbia, Canada” as the standard place (a mere 2000 miles away!)

    It should be easy to fix the algorithm. Someone just needs to do it. This is what the algorithm needs to do: If a match is not found, drop the SMALLEST level of jurisdiction and try again. In the above example, “Manitoba, Canada” would be the best answer if it cannot find the exact place name.

    Adding to the list seems pointless if the Standard Finder itself isn’t working. If the algorithm isn’t fixed, consider abandoning standardized place names, and the problem will disappear.

  2. Marsha P Says:
    March 4th, 2009 at 11:21 am

    I really like the idea of the Standard Finder. It would make things much better if everyone doing genealogy would standardize their work. Do not abandon it, it is a great tool.

  3. Barry N Says:
    March 5th, 2009 at 5:16 pm

    Bill, we have a lot of work to do yet on Canada and it is a very high priority.

    I tried your input with filtering turned off and I got back both the “Tupper, British Columbia, Canada” and the “Manitoba, Canada” as you wanted. Our filtering algorithms have been the subject of much discussion and are (always) being reworked.

    Thank you for your interest and comments. We watch them closely.

    Barry Nay
    FamilySearch Standards Engineering