Gramps Web v24.10.0 & Gramps Web API v2.5.0

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A few days ago, Gramps Web v24.10.0 was released, along with Gramps Web API v2.5.0 (the back-end to Gramps Web). This is a major release for Gramps Web, which is, as the name implies, a web front-end for the desktop Gramps genealogy program. Gramps Web v24.10.0 adds a AI chat feature/assistant and there are multiple steps necessary to enable it. Gramps Web v2.5.0 (details below) is an even bigger update and is required for the AI chat addition. Both are a part of the Gramps Project.

Gramps Web v24.10.0 Changes:

  • Added a “chat” view that gives access to an AI-powered chat assistant which makes it easy to “retrieve information about objects in the family tree database.”
  • Fixed – Issue was solved that caused problems with editing a note after pasting content containing HTML code
  • Updated translations

Download: https://github.com/gramps-project/gramps-web/releases/tag/v24.10.0

Gramps Web API v2.5.0 – October, 2024 (link)
Powered by the semantic search, this release adds an AI chat endpoint using the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technique (see link for armv7 platform users (Raspberry Pi).
A Python-like query language has been added as an alternative to the “Gramps Query Language” (GQL)
Generate app/secret only if SECRET_KEY is unset 
Silence warning gtk version 
Fix issue #545: migrate to pyproject.toml 
Replace Haar Cascade by YuNet for face detection
Added Object Query Language
Provide more insights in emails to admin and self-registered user
python.linting settings are deprecated 

Setting up AI Chat: https://www.grampsweb.org/install_setup/chat/

Using AI Chat: https://www.grampsweb.org/user-guide/chat/

How it works (from the documentation):

  1. The user asks a question.
  2. Gramps Web identifies a number of (e.g., ten) Gramps objects that are most likely to contain the information that answers the question. To this end, it uses a technique called “semantic search”. For instance, if you ask “What’s the name of John Doe’s children?”, if a family exists with John Doe as father, it is likely to be among the top results.
  3. Gramps Web feeds the user question along with the retrieved context information to a large language model (“chatbot”) and asks it to extract the right answer.
  4. The answer is displayed to the user.

Gramps Web is a little more involved in terms of setting up versus The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding, webTrees, or Gigatrees. Using Docker/Docker Compose is the best way to deploy it (link below) and it’s the best way to really collaborate with other genealogists using Gramps – it’s basically a portal for other users to access a Gramps database without installing the desktop version of Gramps themselves. There are three areas that make up Gramps Web – the Gramps Python library (which also ties into the desktop version), the Gramps Web API that makes it accessible over the internet, and Gramps Web itself, which is the Javascript interface/front end.

Related Links:

Screenshot from project page