Perhaps this is a good time to introduce myself, since the list has seen "dramatically increased" activity today. :)
Randy Wilson here. I have been interested in family history since my teenage years, and also have a Ph.D. in Computer Science, which I got from BYU in 1997. A few years back I read Gentech's Genealogical Data Model document and was very impressed by many of the concepts in put forth. In fact, since that time it has been a little bit difficult to continue spending time typing information into my genealogical database, because it really seems like I might be wasting my time unless we can somehow make it so that when one person "assimilates" some genealogical data, others can benefit from it and avoid duplicating the same effort. Those ideas weighed heavily on my mind, so I formalized those thoughts, along with some ideas about what to do about the problem, in a paper I wrote for the 2002 Family History Technology workshop at BYU. The paper is available at: http://axon.cs.byu.edu/~randy/gen/Bilink.html The paper suggests using "bidirectional source linking", where your database points to exactly where every piece of information came from, AND the source points to everything that depends on it, so that when someone comes across some data they can quickly see whether the information has already been worked on and move on to work that still needs to be done. These ideas depend heavily on the Gentech GDM, and it is quite possible that an XML implementation would be required to put such ideas into actual use. So that's why I first contacted Hans, and I'm very interested to see what further ideas everyone has on these subjects. --Randy Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED] >>> Hans Fugal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 06/03/02 10:00AM >>> Michael, Thank you for your interest! Since you found the mailing list I imagine you found the archives (of two whole messages). I have my plan of attack laid out now, and I hope to begin the schema this week. Hans :) * Michael Fitzgerald ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [Sat, 1 Jun 2002 at 02:17 -0700] <quote> > Hi, > > I noticed your work tonight on the Genealogical Data Model in XML. > > I am deeply committed to family history and professionally committed to XML. > > I would like to offer my assistance, if you have any need of it. > > For my professional background, please see http://www.wyeast.net. > > Best, > > Mike Fitzgerald > > > _______________________________________________ > gdmxml mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://fugal.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gdmxml </quote> -- "Everybody is talking about the weather but nobody does anything about it." -- Mark Twain _______________________________________________ gdmxml mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://fugal.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gdmxml _______________________________________________ gdmxml mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://fugal.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gdmxml
