Listen · eight episodes · about 20 minutes each
The MAXGEN podcast
Each schema gets one conversation. Start with the overview if you are new, or jump to the schema you care about. Every episode has a written study guide with practice questions and a glossary.
Subscribe in any podcast app with the feed address https://opengenealogyai.org/podcasts/feed.xml.
These episodes were produced with an AI narration tool from written scripts by the standard's author, and describe MAXGEN v1.11. Where a later release changed a detail, the schema pages on this site are authoritative.
The MAXGEN Overview
21:37Why genealogy data needs a common language, the seven schemas, and the design philosophy behind them.
MaxRecord — Source documents as written
25:40Evidence versus interpretation, and why the clerk who wrote 'Makeswell' must never be corrected.
MaxPerson — The person who might be your ancestor
22:46Assertions not facts, probabilistic parents, composite confidence, and the merge model.
MaxTask — Distributing the work
24:29Task types, the verdict vocabulary, acceptance criteria, and the anti-hallucination rule.
MaxDNA — Genetic evidence without giving up privacy
23:23Hashed kit IDs, consent, endogamy, phasing, and how DNA boosts documentary confidence.
MaxSource — The routing brain
18:16Where records hide: coverage, access, provenance, and semantic search over sources.
MaxRecognition — Teaching machines to read
25:21OCR and handwriting provenance, word-level confidence, labelled inference, and consensus.
MaxName — Why Maxwell and Makeswell are the same family
23:31Variants, cognates, phonetic keys, and the council design process behind the newest schema.