Thanks for the update Martin.
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I think, however, that for FTDNA's public Y-Tree to become a cite-able resource, there should be a mechanism for periodical static "snapshot" publishing like the DOI system mentioned by Iain, which records authorship, version, date of publishing, publisher, and so forth.
(ISOGG did this by freezing their Y-Tree at each year-end with a permanent URL.)
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Currently the raw JSON data for FTDNA's public Y-Tree can be captured fairly simply by a command script using the "curl" utility; it just takes a while to capture the 105+ MB data-stream.
i.e. in Windows 10/11:
curl -o FTDNA-YTREE_%date%.json https://www.familytreedna.com/public/y-dna-haplotree/get
All that remains is to assemble the metadata for the resource and upload it to the static repository.? Ideally the snapshot metadata (author, provider, publisher, version, date, etc.) should be included in the JSON file itself as well.? I presume a DOI repository service should be able to do that during upload processing, but it would be better if it was included at the source by FTDNA.
EDIT: I noticed that the JSON file I just retrieved included the key-value pair "publishedDate":"2025-05-23T16:29:12.367" at the end of the file, so we're part-way there!
Aside from the raw JSON file not being particularly easy to view without a rendering program to convert it to a human-navigable tree, the only other caveat with FTDNA's current JSON structure that I can see is that it records surnames associated with haplogroups, which could trigger privacy concerns.
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Best regards,
Vince T.
