On Chinese and Western Family Trees: Mechanism and Performance

Abstract

Family tree is an efficient data structure to store the kinship information in a family. There are basically two kinds of trees: Western Family Tree (WFT) and Oriental Family Tree such as Chinese Family Tree (CFT). To get an insight of their efficiency in the context of family kinship presentation and information extraction, in this paper we develop WFT and CFT presentation models and search algorithms, comparing their search performance and inherent mechanism. The study reveals that the computational cost is higher in CFT model, but it provides a greater gain in information retrieval and produces more details of the kinship between individuals in the family.