Collaborative genealogy tree in the cloud

Cloud computing has had a significant impact on the way genealogy research had been performed in the last few years, providing hosting and computing facilities, online access to a wide variety of records and trees together with a long term preservation of genealogical data. A further major benefit of genealogy in the cloud is the online collaborative environment through which a whole group of genealogists can work together in order to build a shared family tree. Collaborative genealogy may increase the accuracy of recorded data and highly improves productivity by allowing genealogists to share information instantly and benefit from each other´s research. In this context, the majority of genealogical applications built on the concept of cloud computing focus mainly on providing a largely available storage system - which can ensure a universal access to shared data, but fail to address the issues of ownership and control over the modifications that can be made on the family trees. The aim of this paper is to present our solution to these problems through a genealogical application developed using cloud computing and a BLOB-based versioning mechanism that allows genealogists to grant access for other users but at the same time maintain full control over the introduced modifications in order to prevent the corruption of genealogical data. The versioning mechanism ensures that the modifications introduced by authorized users take effect on the original tree only if the owner approves of them.