Re: [Qgis-user] Joining with Multiple Locations per Person

[Lee Hachadoorian]

On 11/17/2013 03:34 PM, Sasa Sullivan wrote: Hi Lee, Hopefully I can be a bit clearer here, if not please do not hesitate to let me know, either on this post or to my email, I have tried to search online and the help functions for similar questions and responses before I posted to this board. Your questions/statements in bold text. But I could be misunderstanding your intention. Some more detail would be helpful.   The people concerned have been matched to each other via DNA, their mission is to find the most recent common ancestors, this by looking at genealogical data which consists of surnames and locations. I don't want to include the questions about DNA as that is another matter and once I can find answers to this question I can probably answer that one myself.   What is a record in you data?   A record consists of one person with multiple geographical locations and surnames who need to find a common location(s)/surname(s) with other people who also have multiple geographical locations and surnames (some small groups of people are linked to each other as well). There is never just one surname and/or location per person This seems to be outside the "standard" GIS model where an entity has one location (really one geometry) and a fixed number of clearly defined attribute columns. Your entities have a variable number of locations, and perhaps a variable number of attribute columns (the surnames) as well. Possibly this has some similarity to an animal tracking model, where each animal has multiple timepoints, and you might ask where two animals crossed paths. But I am not very familiar with this field and don't know how easy it would be to implement in QGIS or any other tool.   What location data do you have per person?   Each person's location numbers are varied, from four minimum to close to a hundred   At a guess, this is something that can be done without any spatial data, i.e.   Geocoding will work best as it does not rely on spellings with are too varied   Person A is linked to New York City, Person B is linked to New York City, therefore Person A is linked to Person B.   Yes, however Person A and B also have 50 other locations that need to be checked against each other. The data might say NY, NYC, or NY City or New York, NY and other variations, geocoding allows for the different ways a locations is represented I do not want to rely on how others spell their locations and I need to share them on a map.   Initially the people are linked to each other on one or more chromosomes, I can sort that in Excel. There might be another type of programs that can handle my questions however I do not know of any names, then I can transfer the results into QGIS.   This is something I would tend to do in pure SQL.   I do not know much about programming, beyond what someone directs me to do and was hoping the query functions of QGIS would handle what I was asking, if this were a one to one comparison I could do it in Excel or a database program, ultimately I need to put the information on a map   Thank you so much for responding, I don't know of a beginners list to ask these questions. As I write this perhaps I can geocode and let Excel query the latitude and longitude for my matches. Possibly the geocoder outputs some other identifying field like a standardized name, code, or some unique ID. In which case you could search for matches on that field, rather than lat-long. One thing that might make this easier is to think of a person_ancestry_locations table with a person ID and a location (standardized name or code) field, where each person has one record for each location they are associated with. But I can't think of a way to do this in QGIS that isn't incredibly contorted. I would probably just use QGIS for the final mapping of common locations. Best, --Lee -- Lee Hachadoorian Assistant Professor in Geography, Dartmouth College http://freecity.commons.gc.cuny.edu

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