Further to the point, any forward-thinking genealogy database design would start
by tossing GEDCOM. Practically every existing genealogy program I know of has
constrained itself approximately to the limitations of what GEDCOM can represent
and how it organizes things, which severely limits growth. Standards for
interchange are great, but there's no reason we can't design better open
standards. GEDCOM is like the ASCII standard when we could have Unicode. --
Darren Duncan
Darren Duncan wrote:
Ron Savage wrote:
The subject is already long enough, but of course I really mean to
include non-GEDCOM-based genealogical data too.
My purpose here is fishing for ideas re all material related to the
subject. And I do emphasis the topic is /managing/ such data.
I can remember a few years ago - when PCs were slower and RAM was much
more limited - of the (my!) machine struggling to cope with the data
file of the European royal family db.
So, what are people using these days?
Also, if there is any compilation of what extras you'd like GEDCOM to
include, tell me.
The short answer is that I'm making a new database program especially
suited to genealogy, and intended to be better for that than any
existing one, but it is also more generic in design so to handle
organizing important data for any kind of research. The target user
base is professionals, who would most likely appreciate what I bring to
the table, but it is also intended to be usable by laypeople. One
primary feature is that all kinds of entities, attributes, and
relationships are user-defined. Another is that source citation is
recursive, so you can describe sources in all the flexibility you
describe what they way. The design is somewhat in the middle between a
general ontology modeler and a subject-specialized program; it is more
formally structured than a wiki but more flexible than specific-subject
databases. I started working on this back in 1998, but then this work
went on hiatus while I first complete my Muldis D programming language
for databases, over which I will implement the research database
application / model. -- Darren Duncan
