Everett M. Greene wrote:
> JD <jd4x4@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>verizon.net> writes:
>> Ian Goddard <goddai01@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
>>> In practice it seems that the GEDCOM type of model has
>>> influenced genealogical S/W to the extent that there doesn't
>>> seem to be any real advance on it.
>> Again, one of the problems coming out of GEDCOM is that the DATA is
>> getting mixed with the model. The data is and will always be what it
is,
>> right? The differences are in how we each use it and think of it, imo.
>
> All this discussion is interesting (and we hope useful), but
> could there be some elaboration on the above points? It would
> seem that genealogical info describes a network of parents
> to/from children with nets spliced/joined by marriages. How
> does one "improve" on this "model"?
I think the knowledge that we all have a network of parents tracing us
back to Pooh-Bah's "protoplasmic globule" has proved to be too much of a
temptation for many S/W authors. It's a nice tempting structure on
which to base a program. The trouble is that although we know that the
structure exists we don't actually *know* who occupied its nodes.
Half a working life spent investigating the past has left me acutely
aware that what happened in the past, the evidence it left behind and my
interpretation of it are three different things - and your
interpretation would be a fourth.
The past is gone. We can't go there. The best we can do is look for
the evidence, analyse it and interpret it. In any form of investigation
keeping evidence and interpretation distinct is essential and this,
ISTM, is what most, if not all genealogical S/W fails to do.
If we find that John, son of William Smith was baptised in 1692 this
gives us a couple of names and roles. There are very few ways in which
S/W handles this.
One way, the individual-centred, is to invite us to edit the records for
John and William if they exist and add the event and date or to create a
new record for either if it doesn't exist. But the decision as to
whether the individuals in this newly discovered event are the same as
those already in the database is interpretation. So whether we choose
to enter or edit we are leaping straight to interpretation and
relegating the evidence to a footnote.
Another way, event-centred, is to allow us to add the event and create
new individual records for John and William. This gives us what appears
to be a nicely structured representation of the evidence, a record of
the event and records of the names and roles of its participants. We
can move to interpretation in our own time, deferring for as long as we
wish, the question of whether, for instance this John is the same John
as the one who married in 1714 and was the father of Mary Smith baptised
in 1715. If, however, we decide that the infant and the bridegroom were
indeed one and the same the only option available is to merge the two
records. What appeared initially to be a record which was part of the
evidence structure has suddenly been treated as part of the
interpretation. If we were to decide that we shouldn't have merged them
we will have to hand-craft another record to replace the one that was
discarded during the merge and patch up the links.
What we need is an evidence-centred approach which will allow us to
enter the event and the name/role records as part of the evidence and
retain them as permanent records. We would have a different record
which would represent our historical reconstruction (interpretation) of
John Smith. We would then link both our evidential records of John to
this. If we change our mind about the interpretation all we need to do
is delete the link we don't want. Alternatively we might have a link
which carries enough information to record that we're not sure whether
the identification is correct. We could even link an evidential record
to more than one reconstruction until we make up our minds. In data
modeling terms the evidential and interpretational records are different
kinds of entity even if they're both characterised by a name. This, to
my mind, is the minimum model needed to underpin good investigative
practice. Personally I'd want to make the link which represents the
identification between evidence and interpretation into an entity in its
own right, I'd want to make sources into a hierarchy capable of
representing such structure as archives, collections and do***ents
(Gramps is a good example of this) and I'd want each record to have a
globally unique identifier (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globally_Unique_Identifier)
to facilitate
information sharing.
This produces a more complex model than that which underlies GEDCOM. We
could use GEDCOM to represent the evidential view or the
interpretational view but we can't use it do both at the same
time nor can it tell us which view it's representing.
--
Ian
Hotmail is for spammers. Real mail address is igoddard
at nildram co uk
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