

Show HN: Phdtree – create and search your academic genealogy - mende
http://phdtree.org/

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rubidium
To get more data, check out
<http://chemistry.library.nd.edu/resources/genealogy/physics/>
<http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/> <\--lots of Mathematicians.

You could probably figure out a way to take those data sets and incorporate
them, as they're relatively complete and well researched.

I'm glad to see you allow for multiple advisors, as that seems to show up
every now and then.

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mende
We're working on this side project which allows users to create & edit their
academic genealogy. Essentially it is a wiki site powered by Django/Python. So
far all the basic wiki functions like CRUD, tracking edit history, diff
different versions, reverting back to previous version, search, etc are
completed.

Would appreciate it if HN community can provide some
feedback/comments/suggestions. Many thanks!

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drdustin
Great!

It would be nice if I could see the entire tree of ancestors at once.

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happyhappy007
I was just thinking the same, but then on a second thought, wouldn't that
create a huge web of people inter-connected together that couldn't fit into
one page? Maybe could use Ajax to dynamically expand the family tree as users
scroll up or down

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mswen
Cool goal - reminds me a bit of the graph of boards of directors which lets
you see how the web of board members for major corporations are intertwined.

My first assumption was that you had scrapped University sites and/or tried
mining LinkedIn and had already constructed a database of thousands of
scholars and their academic genealogy. But from your comment that doesn't seem
to be the case.

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mende
Thanks for the encouraging word. Yes, you're absolutely right, initial data
were generated by data mining several other websites, but our goal is to build
this database as a wiki such that anyone can correct errors, add more
profiles, add more connections, etc.

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Fuzzwah
My wife is a postdoc in neurotrauma so obviously I checked if she was in the
system. She wasn't, so I added her and updated her boss's entry too. I pulled
in the correct names for their positions from their linkedin profiles, so I
figured I'd drop a comment putting forward that perhaps adding some kind of
lookup (or at least link to) of people's linkedin details.

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sfeats
Nice idea. As a current PhD student I'm having fun filling in the gaps for
those who have come before me.

Can you present some links for people in the database who have large academic
trees? Everyone I'm searching for ends up being isolated so I don't know what
a tree looks like on your website!

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mende
Thanks for your contribution. Try search "Nathan A. Baker"

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happyhappy007
Nice side project, but it seems there are a lot of duplicate profiles, just to
name a few:

a search of "Albert Einstein" returned 3

Niels Bohr: 4

Stephen Hawking: 3

Richard Feynman: 2

Lennard Jones: 2

linus pauling: 2

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mende
Thanks for pointing it out, we're working on implementing a "merge profile"
feature. Once completed, duplicate profiles can easily be merged into one.

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joeyo
What are you doing differently than the existing academic trees---neurotree,
economicstree, etc (<http://academictree.org>) ?

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mende
Their UI is very difficult to use, we tried, but give up eventually. That's
part of the reason we created phdtree.org. We believe we have a much better
user experience and "wiki" support. Try phdtree.org, and let us know what you
think.

