The User Dashboard

Every time you build a family tree using Gigatrees, it sends anonymous statistics to the Gigatrees server where it is saved into a user database. Statistics include such things as GEDCOM file properties, quality scores and build history. No personally indentifiable information is sent. The statistics are grouped in the database by website title, so you can keep your family trees separate. The User Dashboard can view these statistics in several useful charts and in its raw form. You have the option of downloading the raw data extracted directly from the user database in JSON format. This may be useful for programmers who wish to create their own views. You can also view or delete individual raw data entries as well. The sample images were taken from the dashboard for my family tree, Greybeard's Ghosts. As you can see from the images below, hovering or tapping a point on any chart displays detailed information.

To sign in to the dashboard, you will need your application id. The application is displayed at both the top and bottom of your build log (i.e. G-XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXXX). The application id is unique to the computer hardware running Gigatrees and does not change over time unless a hardware change is detected; this has only been seen on rare occasions when hardware ports stop working or communicating with the CPU. Due to the uniqueness of the application id, your desktop and laptop will have different values. The application id serves as your unencrypted access code to the dashboard, and even though the user database does not contain any personally identifiable information, you should probably try to keep your id private by not publishing it online. To see a live demonstration of several sample website builds, you can sign-in using the guest application id, XXXXXXXXXX (that is 10x's).

After signing in, you will be presented with several collapsable views. The views may change over time as new ones are added.

The first of these displays the GEDCOM file properties. The first panel displays the GEDCOM filename, version and character set detected, the file encoding and character set, the exporting application name and version. The second panel displays the logical record counts. Gigatrees supports Source Template and Location records included by the #RootsMagic and #Legacy Family Tree applications. If you build multiple family trees, they will presented in a dropdown box where you can select which tree to display. The dashboard groups statistics based on your website title, so be sure to set the title appropriately.

The second view displays your Gigatrees version history.

The third view displays your build history using a bubble chart, where the size of the bubble is determined by the GEDCOM file size. A variety of useful data points are available in the tooltips to help track progress, including the date, filename, runtime, GEDCOM file size and number of lines, number of files saved, the quality score and Gigatrees version.

The fourth view displays your quality score history. The first panel displays the raw score so that is can be tracked. The quality score is a rough measurement of the quality of your family tree, and is based on the types of claims made, the quality of the sources referenced and other basic best-practice parameters. An obvious goal would be to improve this score over time. The second panel shows three of the most important claim types: parental association, vital events (i.e. birth, marriage, death, etc.) and census events; and the total number of each claim type detected in your GEDCOM file, the total number that include source references (of all qualities), and the number that have the highest quality (i.e. certain). There are in addition many more parameters used in calculating this score, but are more difficult to represent on a simple chart. The easiest way to improve the quality score is to provide high quality source references for all your claims, but especially the three mentioned here. See Reliability Assessments and Defining Source Categories for additional information on how to use source references to improve your quality score.

The quality scores are weighted and graded on a curve, not dissimilar to U.S. school grading systems. The below diagram shows the quality scores for 500 users. You can see that they range here from 57 (F) to 97 (A+), with an average for all users (not just those shown here) of about 78 (C+/B-).

The fifth view shows totals for various records found in your GEDCOM file. The first of these is for individual records. If you hide or skip certain individuals, such as might happen when building a family tree for subset of persons, then the total for those persons for whom profile pages are created are also listed. The second, shows the total number of source records and source references. In this case, separate scales are shown for the y-axis. The third, shows the total number of claims (of all types: parental, vital, non-vital, census, attributes and names) are shown alongwith the number which reference source records (documented).

The sixth view shows the calculated average life spans for all males and females found in your family tree for whom both a birth date and death date are provided. The bars indicate the number of persons counted for each century. This is a fun way to view trends. Note that the vertical scales may be different for each gender as is shown in this diagram.

The seventh view shows the count of the most common names found in your family tree for both men and women, and sorted by most common first. The horizontal scales may vary between genders as is shown in this diagram.