Multple Relationship Paths!

I have cross referenced this in http://help.geni.com/entries/478636-ability-to-remove-a-certain-per...

This is a most desirable feature. My tree is almost complete 300 years back in time and I meet the same ancestors from different points of view. I would like to have a function where these nodes in the tree are identified and the different paths to reach them.

And of course. Relationsships by marriage is not very interesting, but may be an option if desired...

Still looking forward to this functionality!

Is it possible to make this feature by using the api?

Sverre, yes and no.

Finding the shortest and multiple paths require a lot of processing power and especially quick access to all 64 million profiles in the big tree, which is quite impossible using the API, at least if you want quick answers. I suggest you Google on what is called the shortest path challenge.

Using the API to tell that your direct ancestors have multiple paths to you (like both 13th and 10th grandfather) is quite possible, and done by both myself and Jadra, but still quite time consuming in the communication with the Geni API server.

So, technically we should hope Geni implements some, and I am sure that they do that when their new Graph server are up and running, giving up to 100 times better speed in internal data processing.

Interesting thoughts Bjørn.
I am an IT professional myself and my company Aspiria is working with similar "big data" questions with banks and oil companies. 64 million profiles is a high number but not a very high. Should be possible to give reply to such questions within reasonable time if the data is well organized and the servers are quick. They already have the functionality to submit this as a batch job with a later reply ....

Really looking forward to this feature .....

You asked about using the Api.
Processing 64 million profiles using a web query for each profile is the challenge if you want to use the Api to find the shortest path.
Secondly you should remember that Geni have 7 million registered users who in theory could make such a request in parallel ;-)
It is definitely a batch job that should run directly on the server where all possible paths are store and reused as it is today.

You also have a rate limit on 40 requests per 10 seconds when using the API, but it is possible to request multiple profiles in one request.

Here is by the way Mike@Geni's answer about Multiple paths in the API project discussions:
http://www.geni.com/discussions/110284?msg=801734

Agree with you and looking forward to the solution ....

Does anyone know if there has been any more news on this?

It would be nice to be able to search with certain conditions such as "blood relationship only" or perhaps including or excluding certain people.

For what it's worth, I didn't want to wait and therefore, I adopted the good old fashion "manual" approach. Starting from my profile, I click on every possible chain of parents, going about 10 generations back, and record the results. Multiple paths to the same ancestors then become visible.

I record my results in this project:

http://www.geni.com/projects/Mes-Pionniers-%C3%89dition-Mario-Morel...

I am about 30% through to all my ancestors. I have done the complete tree above my father's father. I am working on the tree above my father's mother.

Very interesting but tedious. If we had an automated feature it would be most welcome.

I would be happy to just have the option to only include blood relationships (which should require less processing time to compute anyway). The reason is that relationship paths like this actual one I just got:
"is your second cousin once removed's wife's first cousin once removed's husband's aunt's husband's brother's wife's first cousin twice removed."
just really is not very useful. I would be much more interested to know that we are simply 8th cousins once removed by blood.

I like Geni 'sideways' paths, and do use them
regularly to check tree density

Is this feature still in the pipeline?

I am hoping with the progress of BigData and AI processeing this feature is still in the works.
Maybe some limits would be imposed, but showing TOP 5 Paths for a relation would be great. Specially for cases where cousins who maried cousins you can quickly understand the paths/relation between 2 people in the family