This is a robot for tracking, and creating a local mirror of, changes to a mediawiki-based genealogy site.

BACKGROUND:

Wikipedia has defined an extensible 'person' table (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Infobox_person), with which users can embed structured information a person into an unstructured, curated page about the person. I have taken this same approach for my family tree site at jimlindstrom.com (see: http://jimlindstrom.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=James_Brian_Lindstrom). The unstructured page is human-consumable reading/browsing, while the structured data allows me to do interesting things like plotting the migrations of my family:

http://jimlindstrom.com/family_viz/migration_map.html?name=James%20Brian%20Lindstrom

USAGE:

Invoking "./family_tree_robot.rb --reset-db --download-all" will cause the robot to reset its internal database and then re-download all pages from the site. You can then leave the robot running, to sync against changes in real- time.

Use "./print_my_ancestors.rb 'James Brian Lindstrom' > /tmp/ancestors.html" to dump a textual tree view of your ancestors