I’m at the FamilySearch conference today. Right now Phil Windely is talking about open data and the related technical formats – REST, Json, RDF, and Microformats. I think this is good information for this crowd since sharing data is key to genealogy research. For years the methods of sharing data and integrating systems has been complex requiring conversations and planning between the involved parties. If instead you open your data and provide it in simple formats that others can consume, interesting, serendipitous things start to happen.