Ancestry Patents

So far this year the European Patent Office has published these patents for Ancestry.com. Give youself a gold star if you understand!

DETECTING IBD EFFICIENTLY USING A DISTRIBUTED SYSTEM
Abstract
Disclosed herein relates to a method that uses the RAM of multiple servers to increase the efficiency of identifying segments of a target dataset that match segments of other datasets in a database. An encoding system may encode large genetic datasets to produce pairs of bitmap sequence pairs that correspond to an encoding scheme. The servers each store portions of the database in their hard drives based on a shared characteristic of the genetic datasets in the database, such as ethnicity or location of birth. The servers encode data from their hard drives and sustain the encoded data in their RAM. A target, or query, individual is input for matching. The servers match the encoded data of the target individual with encoded data in their flash drives and can determine a relationship. The servers sustain the encoded data in RAM to compare against subsequent target individuals.

MACHINE-LEARNING BASED AUTOMATED DOCUMENT INTEGRATION INTO GENEALOGICAL TREES
Abstract
Systems and methods for importing documents are described. An input image is received and preprocessed. OCR and/or page segmentation and chapter detection are performed. Special-case processing is performed for lists, tables, free text, and other categories. Anaphora (repetition at the beginning of a sentence to create emphasis) analysis, stemming (the process of reducing a word to its stem that affixes to suffixes and prefixes or to the roots of words known as “lemmas”), lemmatization (grouping together different inflected forms of the same word), and relationship detection are performed. A genealogical tree is generated, augmented, or merged based on the extracted entities and relationships.

TRANSFORMING AND NAVIGATING HISTORICAL MAP IMAGES
Abstract
Systems and methods for transforming and navigating historical map images are presented. The systems and methods embodiments facilitate providing, searching for, retrieving, transforming, and/or navigating a historical map image vis-à-vis a modern location and/or map. A map interface facilitates automatedly overlaying, annotating, and aligning a historical map image(s) with a modern map, allowing a user to search for a location and see the same in the historical map image, and change a visibility of the overlaid and aligned map images relative to each other. The map interface provides user interactions that facilitate retrieving, viewing, and manipulating records, historical districts, and other pertinent data through interacting with a particular location and/or searched-for individual, such as an ancestor or other person of interest.