Ukrainian developer Volodymyr has developed and launched the Mystok platform, which uses artificial intelligence to process archival documents, birth records, pre-revolutionary press, and digitized registers. The project is designed to restore the missing or distorted history of Ukrainian settlements and help users search for reliable information about their ancestors.
Ukrainian developer Volodymyr has developed and launched the Mystok platform, which uses artificial intelligence to process archival documents, birth records, pre-revolutionary press, and digitized registers. The project is designed to restore the missing or distorted history of Ukrainian settlements and help users search for reliable information about their ancestors.
The IT guy shared the details of the development and principles of the system on Reddit, and also outlined the methodology on the project’s official website.
The idea of creating the site arose due to the problem of the prevalence of identical and unverified data on the network. According to the developer, search engines for queries about Ukrainian villages usually give out identical template text without references to primary sources. To solve this, Volodymyr involved AI for in-depth analysis of data sets, access to which is difficult for the average user.
The project’s sources include works by 19th-century local historians, materials from FamilySearch and Wikimedia Commons, the LIBRARIA electronic archive, regional press from the 1930s, and birth records from the Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine (CSIDAK) and the State Archive of Kyiv Region (DAKO). Artificial intelligence analyzes handwritten and printed scans, performs optical character recognition (OCR) for old newspapers, and compares data between different sources.
«This is where ŞIshka comes into its own: it gnaws at those scans, parses OCR of century-old newspapers, and compares one source with another. What it does overnight, I couldn’t do with my hands in a month,» says the developer.
The project pays special attention to preventing AI hallucinations and strict fact-checking. The author of the platform is guided by the principle: «no source — no statement.» Each fact on the site is accompanied by a footnote with a link to the document. In addition, algorithms do not connect people in a family tree only by the same surname or a common village — this requires direct documentary confirmation.
Currently, the Mystok website documents data on 44 settlements, 122 detailed biographies, 373 historical events, and 36 analytical analyses of facts. The project is completely non-commercial, does not contain advertising, and is developing as an open knowledge base with a gradual expansion of geography.
