Re: Genealogical evidence and data model

On Fri, 1 Feb 2008 09:07:37 PST, mojaveg@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Everett M. Greene) declaimed the following in soc.genealogy.computing:

> 
> How do you find the pedigree of an individual in an event-linked
> database?  It would seem that you'd have links to all over the
> place to a lot of events that many people would consider to be
> trivia and no "root" from which to start tracing the lineage
> of any individual.
>
	Those "links" to all those other people are typically assigned roles
(titles), so one scheme would be that a birth even has the primary
person (the one whose birth is being recorded in the event) and may have
two roles (father, mother) which link to the specified parents. In this
scheme, a bloodline is created by following those particular roles.

	The alternative, used by TMG, is to create relation****p events --
one event for father relation****p, one for mother relation****p. In TMG,
every event ("tag") has room for two "principles", all the "other
people" are added into a witness list in the event.

	Instead of the lineage-linked "family" record that has an individual
and two pointers (father, mother).

> Perhaps I don't grasp the concept of event-linked data, but
> it makes it seem that event-linked would be like a stew --
> everything's in there but just try to find a particular
> item.

	Works well -- and fits a relational database structure much easier.
It even allows for insertion of candidate relation****ps... while only
one each of "father/mother" is marked as "primary" (meaning it is used
for producing re****ts that need to trace generations), one can still add
other relation****ps... So one can have, say, father-birth relation****p
as primary if one wants to trace actual bloodline, but also add a
father-adoption relation****p... By making the latter "primary" the same
re****t would now trace "family" rather than blood...
-- 
	Wulfraed	Dennis Lee Bieber		KD6MOG
	wlfraed@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Bestiaria Sup****t Staff:		web-asst@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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