I hope it is ok to post this here. Becky Mason Walker is looking for someone with the ability and desire, having coding and genealogy experience, to take on maintaining GDAT, Genealogical Data Analysis Tool. I use it alongside Gramps and of course, my gedcom that I imported into it was created by Gramps. You can communicate with her through private message on Facebook. The group user page is here but private.
the Genealogical DNA Analysis Tool (GDAT). It is designed so data from any testing company can be loaded by the user. [ Except Ancestry.com ]
Can it be converted to a Gramps addon ?
What Programming Language is it written in?
What License is the source code under?
What is the “Ancestry.com specific data will be deleted (see Cease & Desist letter).” & GDAT does not support Ancestry and any posts on Ancestry and ways around the C&D letter will be deleted. about and how will it apply to the person taking over?
That’s commercial donationware software. I would expect the objective is to have someone buy her out and take over the venture. Or pay a royalty.
So this is not a suggestion that it be rolled into the Gramps project? Rather, that an experienced Gramps developer might be a candidate to move into the realm of commercial genealogy software.
How?
No indication that it is commercial and the screenshot on the website
shows that it only donation supported. the first message here also only mentions
to take on maintaining GDAT,
So not to purchase or take over ownership of the project based on the wording only to maintain the program!
@emyoulation Can you change the title to show it has nothing to do with a new Gramps addon or development or move it to the development section maybe?
It is not for profit. It is free software and has been very useful. At one time it could capture data from ancestry but she took that ability out after the Cease & Desist letter that ancestry sent to several people/websites. She posted that warning to protect herself when ancestry got nasty. I don’t know the answers to the other questions but I’m sure you can ask her and get all the answers. That would be great if it could be used as an addon to gramps.
moved. Thanks for the correction.
This used to be called Genome Mate Pro. It looks it fell afoul of guilt-by-association with a data mining utility called Pedigree Thief by Colin Thomson. (What an awful product name.) That tool violated Ancestry’s terms of service and did unthrottled scraping of DNA match data from their site into Genome Mate Pro.
From what I can tell, emyoulation, Pedigree Thief doesn’t do anything more than the tool at wikitree called Wikitree Sourcer. Gedmatch allows users to post wikitree links or gedcoms and Pedigree theif captures that so it can be inserted into the relative profile within GDAT. Actually, you can use Ctrl A, Ctrl C and Ctrl V to snatch data/material from any page so we are being a theif, so to speak. These tools are just steps up from that and even more useful.
The message posted in that Data Mining site clocked Pedigree Thief at downloading 420 matches in an hour. Another claimed a thousand matches in 3.5 minutes.
Both of those would produce excessively heavy loads on Ancestry… essentially creating a DoS state if the tool is run by a large enough number of users and without consent of that online service.
Pedigree Thief no longer polls Ancestry for DNA data. So you might be looking a lighter load and different feature set than what Ancestry found objectionable in 2020.
Just a bit of extra detail. I use this software often.
The program is definitely free, and the source code can be downloaded.
It is written in a language called Xojo, which is cross-platform and comes with its own IDE. As far as I can make out, that started out as a type of object-oriented visual basic.
There was recently added a web framework, but that is a separate development path from the desktop
When I last looked, you can experiment with it for free, but need to buy a licence to generate the cross-platform apps.
It is also currently built with a licensed sqlite3 library that includes encryption, but I am not sure encryption is essential or just done for security/privacy.
GDAT does not interact directly with any other web site - it just loads data provided by other sources. Ideally these were downloadable files provided by the dna companies themselves, but in their wisdom they have decided to provide less and less, leading to increased reliance on scraping. The old lose-lose situation. Shrug.