Around Christmas 2005, I had a bit of time at home and was looking thriough some old family photos. Since these were gathering dust in a box, I thought it would be a good idea to scan them. There is some data on some photographs about who, when and where the photograph was taken, so I gathered this data as XML. Of course it doesn't make a lot of sense without a bit of geneological data so I captured the basics of births, deaths and marriages for part of the family as well. I have to confess that the schemas for both these collections were home-grown.In putting togther a simple eXist application to browse this data, one aim was to fill in some of the blanks. Many photographs were undated, but you could often guess at the age of a child, and if you know when the child was born, you can date the photograph, and hence age the other people of known birthdates too. This derived data is computed on demand. Events have been generalized to cover family history, photographs and a few world events as they affected the family, notably the stock market crash of the '20s. This enables an event view to be constructed for a given person.
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