TMG-L Archives
Archiver > TMG > 2002-02 > 1012581663
From: "Gene Stuff" <>
Subject: Re: [TMG] Witness and Roles and V5.0
Date: Fri, 01 Feb 2002 16:41:03 +0000
>From: "Jim Byram" <>
>...There is no reason for TMG not to output to a GEDCOM 5.5 file for all
>individuals associated with an individual event irrespective of
>whether the individual is p1, p2, or a witness. The GEDCOM will have
>no provision to deal with roles per se although this could be
>accomplished via the note field....
Putting roles in the note field is an excellent idea. Outputting one event
per linked person is exactly how it works in UFT. (Only for principals, but
number of principals is unlimited.) This makes a LOT of sense. Let's think
about how GEDCOM is most used. It's used to transfer data to other
genealogy software. There are no other event-based genealogy packages
currently on the market, with the possible exception of Heredis. Therefore,
it's likely that GEDCOM output will be used to transfer data to a
lineage-linked program. If you were to enter an event such as census into a
lineage-linked program you would have to enter a separate event for each
person. (Examples of these programs are FTM, Legacy, etc.) Other uses of
GEDCOM are submission to WorldConnect or the LDS family history library,
etc. These also seem to make no provision for cross event linking of
individuals. Yes, there is data lost by this type of output, but not nearly
as much as not outputting witnesses at all. Also, it would certainly be
possible to use notes to list the other participants in the event as well as
their roles if desired.
>To do the above would require major
>and extensive changes to the program and to the GEDCOM output module
>and considerable discussion to determine how such a feature might need
>to work. I suspect that the other couple of thousand items on the to
>do list have a higher priority at this time.
Very few items that I can think of would have a higher priority (for me)
than remedying major data loss.
>...is census an individual
>event or a family event? Under the GEDCOM 5.5 specs, census can be
>either...
I wasn't aware that a census event could be a family event. I'm not sure
how this would work because all the children in the family are probably not
associated with every census and non-family members may be associated with
it. It makes more sense to me to create individual events for each linked
person.
...>And then there is the problem that just because you can create
>information in a GEDCOM doesn't mean that the importing program can
>deal with the data.
My experience is that they (FTM, Legacy, WorldConnect) deal with individual
events quite well. As stated above you do lose the linkages of the many
people to the single event because you create events from the single one. I
don't see any way around that problem.
>The real solution to the above issues (to a point)
>will be whatever replaces GEDCOM as the means of transferring data
>between programs.
>Jim
No, replacing GEDCOM with say, XML will not solve the problem. The
underlying problem is the difference in database structures between
event-based and lineage-linked software. Using a different markup language
will not solve the core problem of how to transfer data from software that
allows many individuals to be linked to a single event to one that doesn't
allow that.
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