Thanks everyone for the interesting comments. One thing that helped was grasping I need to define the issue tighter. A few comments ...
Mark S: Are we talking about modeling relationships, or about portraying > them? > Right. Good question! I think I'm too foggy. Actually, my principle interest is in kinship terminology ... for instance. NOT so much: "My Uncle Fred" AS: "My Father's Youngest Brother". Its not genealogy per se that I want to depict, so much as formal kinship terms (e.g. in many cultures the term for what we call "Uncle" is different if its "Fa Br" or "Mo Br", two terms, not one). In one sense its fininte in that there are only so many kin-terms a culture uses. Though the "kin-term" approach is fully compatible with genealogical trees of actual people. Mark S: With the right structure, you should be able to produce lists of > whatever relationships you want to know about. > Portraying the relationships graphically is a different matter, Right. That was part where I started that HTML lists (as far as I know) can only depict one hierarchy at a time (so it works for "unilineal" descent [i.e. you only tracing descent through either the male or female line]). But for visual depiction you really need something that can deal with "marriage" (affinity), a lateral intersection of hierarchies (most Western kinship is "bilateral"). So you probably right I could trace lines of descent (via TW emulating a relational database to worm your way through it). And Bimlas' "kin filter" seems to make that easier too. But graphical representation looks like its a different ball game?? PMario: Just think about relations which contain divorce, death and > marriage, 2 fathers, 2 mothers + Children in every possible combination. Absolutely right, in actual usage, for instance, many Westerners use "qualified" kin terms (though these are nearly always based on the underlying social concept of biological generation. But they extend on them in many ways). This greatly increases the complexity of the issue. Like: "my adopted daughter", "my foster child"; "my biological child", "my real mother", "my partner", "my third husband", "my same sex husband" etc. Jed: I think that the most difficult part here would be routing the lines > for when a group of siblings has more than three parents between them. It > becomes difficult to display the parents on one line with the chilhren > below them without lines crossing. Right. I know how to do it in hand drawn diagrams even for complex cases like "the levriate" where a dead man's brother has to marry the deceased's wife. Its an interesting problem. I can do it manually but I just not can figure out how to do it computationally. bimlas: Just a quick thought: you might want to think about "text to UML > diagram" tools like Mermaid <https://mermaidjs.github.io/>flowchart > (TiddlyWiki > plugin > <https://gt6796c.github.io/#%24%3A%2Fplugins%2Fgt6796c%2Fmermaid-tw5%2Fexample:HelloThere%20%24%3A%2Fplugins%2Fgt6796c%2Fmermaid-tw5%2Fexample>) > > or one of the PlantUML <http://plantuml.com/index> generators (TiddlyWiki > plugin <http://tobibeer.github.io/tw5-plugins/#plantuml>). The structure > could be converted with the wikify widget to the text needed to create the > UML diagram. Thanks! I think its a good suggestion to look at those diagramming tools. I kinda overlooked them. I tried in a number of graphics libraries and failed as they couldn't do lateral conjuction and hierarchy at the same time. I should look again! TonyM: ... I am confident this can all be encapsulated in tiddlywiki and > that producing the graphical representation of such relationships is a > matter of user interface design. You may be right that tiddlers can be used to record the relationships between people accurately (like Mark S, too, indicates). But as you hint, I the presentation of that data could be very tricky. I haven't got anywhere with it. Thanks again! And best wishes Josiah -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/d4ef23ba-bbe4-456b-a6c0-5cbd4143ec8a%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
