The following is a press release from MyHeritage ~
MyHeritage Releases Exclusive Book Matching Technology for Family History
MyHeritage users to automatically receive relevant excerpts from digitized books that reveal information about their ancestors and relatives
TEL
AVIV, Israel & LEHI, Utah, April 7, 2016 — MyHeritage, the
fastest-growing destination for discovering, preserving and sharing family
history, has launched today a revolutionary addition to its suite of
technologies: Book Matching. This innovation automatically researches users'
family trees in historical books with high precision.
In April 2012 MyHeritage
launched SuperSearch™, a search engine for historical records, which has since
then grown to include 6.6 billion historical records, including birth,
marriage, death and census records. By implementing its vision of enhancing
genealogy with technology, MyHeritage then developed a line of unique and
sophisticated technologies that automatically match the records from the search
engine to the 32 million family trees uploaded by its users.
In December 2015,
MyHeritage expanded its data collections to include digitized historical books,
with an initial corpus of 150,000 books of high genealogical value. This
collection was tripled last week to 450,000 books with 91 million pages. With a
team of more than 50 dedicated curators, MyHeritage aims to add hundreds of
millions of pages of digitized books to the collection each year.
As of today, MyHeritage
users will receive matches between profiles in their family trees and the books
from this collection. The Book Matching technology analyzes the book texts
semantically, understanding complex narrative that describes people, and
matches it to the 2 billion individuals in MyHeritage family trees with
extremely high accuracy. This breakthrough technology is the first of its kind,
and is exclusive to MyHeritage.
Book Matching has produced
more than 80 million matches, and this number will continue to grow as the
collection grows and as the family trees on MyHeritage continue to expand. Book
Matching is currently available for English books, and the technology is being
enhanced to cover additional languages. In addition, de-duplication technology
is being added in the next few weeks to remove duplicate books that have been
scanned and OCRed more than once by different sources.
“No one has ever done this
before," said MyHeritage Chief Technology Officer, Sagi Bashari. “Our Book
Matching technology reads hundreds of thousands of books for you, every hour,
comparing them to your family tree and pointing you to relevant excerpts about
your ancestors with almost no false positives. MyHeritage is the first to offer
full semantic text analysis in this way, and the genealogical breakthroughs
speak for themselves. You will be amazed at the value of books for your
research."
“I've personally seen what
this new technology can do, using my own family tree,” said blogger and
lifelong genealogist Leland Meitzler. “It found well over 500 books with
information on my family, most of which I'd never seen before. All kinds of
ancestors and relatives can now be added to my tree! To say that this new search technology changes
everything would be an overstatement, but not by much.”
Genealogist James Tanner
said: “This advanced technology from MyHeritage opens up a whole new world of
research possibilities that were almost completely unavailable in the past. I
have always valued the content of the older genealogy books because the people
who wrote them were contemporaries with my ancestors. Being able to search
these books on a large scale will change the way most of us have been doing
genealogy and our attitude towards the books that have been there all along but
were not searchable.”
Dick Eastman, of Eastman’s
Online Genealogy Newsletter, summed up MyHeritage’s latest innovation:
"MyHeritage Book Matching is like having a huge library at your
fingertips, with a twist; there is a magical librarian who tells you exactly
which books have information about your ancestors."
Book Matches are available
at www.myheritage.com and are generated automatically for any
family tree built on the website or imported into it. A Data subscription is
required to view Book Matches.
About
MyHeritage
MyHeritage is the world's fastest-growing destination
for discovering, preserving and sharing family history. As technology thought
leaders, MyHeritage is transforming family history into an activity that’s
accessible and instantly rewarding. Its global user community enjoys access to
a massive library of historical records, the most internationally diverse
collection of family trees and groundbreaking search and matching
technologies. Trusted by millions of families, MyHeritage provides an easy way
to share family stories, past and present, and treasure them for generations to
come. MyHeritage is available in 42 languages. www.myheritage.com
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