On Tuesday, October 2, 2012 11:11:53 PM UTC+10, Tony Proctor wrote: > "pblair" <pblair@pcug.org.au> wrote in message > > news:9f9c9574-ff5f-4523-84bd-8d94ce96d5f5@googlegroups.com... > > > Be safe. > > > > > > I add a latitude and longitude (which seem to have been reasonably stable > > > over the years) and let folk find the place for themselves, in whatever > > > form it is... > > > > > > Paul > > > > > > > Finding coordinates for a historical place is generally not easy Paul, > > particularly if it no longer exists. You would still need to store the place > > name anyway so why not rely on a Place Authority to give you an agreed > > location for any given named place? > > > > Tony Proctor Maybe you should try it...and no, the place name isn't necessary, if you so choose.

Dennis Lee Bieber wrote: > On Tue, 2 Oct 2012 15:35:55 +0100, "Tony Proctor" > <tony@proctor_NoMore_SPAM.net> declaimed the following in > soc.genealogy.computing: > >> I can easily answer all of these questions Cheryl, but then I suspect you >> don't really want me to. If you happen to have ancestors from a different >> galaxy then I hope you include the names of those galaxies in your data :-) >> > Ah, but whose names? Their's or our's? Which applies to place-names of countries other than England and the US. Look at what happened to Peking and Calcutta recently. Cheryl

Tom Wetmore wrote: > Tony, > > I disasgree that things can be done with a single hierarchy, say > based on modern times, that then points off to associated data > to handle earlier time periods and other dimensions. > > Here's an example. Poland. The history of Poland is complex. > Every location in Poland fits within an incredible number of > different hierarchies. Locations > have been in many countries over time (Poland, Germany [West Prussia], > Austria, Russia, Lithuania, ...). When in those nations every location was in > a separate political hierarchy. And each of those hierarchies changed over > time as the political leaders rearranged boundaries. In parallel there > were the religious hierarchies. Poland has been divided into catholic > parishes, protestent arrangements, Jewish arrangements, all overlapping > in time and in space. > Towns and cities had/have a multiplicity of spellings depending upon the > nationality of the speaker or the purpose of the hierarchy. > > I don't believe this complexity can be handled by a single > hierarchical tree with associated information. If I am wrong, > however, the job might be a bit easier, but I don't think so. Your > "associated information" would have to become so complex > in a case like Poland that I bet you'd throw up your hands and > head for the graph solution. > > You can see the beauty of the solution that some people use, > that is, record place names in terms of the place names > in use today. It allows them to avoid this whole messy area! > > But I think it's pretty darn weird to record an event that > occurred in Connecticut before the American revolution > as having occurred in the United States. I record those > events as occurring in Connecticut Colony (and I would > add Great Britain as the country in the cases where it were > needed). Well, uh, but, I would have sworn "Great Britain" was an island, not a country. Things were happening in Plymouth Colony and in Virginia before the UK existed (170-something wasn't it?) so you can't claim that John Rolfe's child was born in Virginia UK, England or Great Britain. Virginia was a stand-alone real estate scam until 1625 when it became a Crown Colony. If saying something happened in 1616 in Virginia USA is wrong, so is saying it happened in 1616 in Virginia Great Britain or Virginia UK. At least by saying USA you put people on the right continent. No sneezable trick these days. Cheryl

Tom Wetmore wrote: > On Tuesday, October 2, 2012 10:17:03 AM UTC-4, singhals wrote: > >> The obvious problem with creating hierarchies is -- who gets >> the final say on what goes in? > > Experts and historians do this work. Whoever provides the > data. If it's full of errors we turn somewhere else. We depend > upon the knowledge of experts for every aspect of our lives. > >> Then since clearly hierarchy means something different to >> each of us, does your hierarchy begin in the Milky Way >> Galaxy and work its fumbling way down to 123 West Main >> Street or does it go the other direction? In either event, >> does a church parish out-rank a civil parish (where both >> exist -- or, I guess, at all). > > If you'd read what I wrote and understood it, you > would realize we are talking about a forest of hierarchies, Good thing I've never been as blonde as you seem to think. > a directed graph of place names that can be used to handle > multi-dimensions of time periods, languages, ecclesiastical > dimensions, political dimensions and so on. Do you know > what a graph is? This the basic mathematical underpinnings > needed to provide the modeling for these services, and it > is among the simplest of mathematical concepts to > implement as a data structure and write algorithms for. > It is the graph structures that allow multiple pure containment > hierarchies to coexist. The parallel hierarchies have no "ranking" > with respect to each other. They are different hierarchies. > This is a subtlety you need to grasp before you > can comment meaningfully. > >> And, in either event of either event -- how will the >> hierarchy indicate to the reader that "Glaxon Parish" as a >> place-name is incomplete, or whether said parish is civil or >> church? > > Uh, by indicating it. I covered this in what I wrote before. You > enter a partial place name. You do or do not try to limit that > partial place name to a time, language, region, religion, etc. You > push a button. Out comes all the fully qualified names from > all the hierarchies in all the dimensions you are interested in. > How will this magic gazetteer *know* which "Somerset" is meant if the only word given it is Somerset? Cheryl

>Well, uh, but, I would have sworn "Great Britain" was an >island, not a country. Mea culpa, but see the other gazetteer thread for the correction. >Things were happening in Plymouth Colony and in Virginia >before the UK existed (170-something wasn't it?) so you >can't claim that John Rolfe's child was born in Virginia UK, >England or Great Britain. Virginia was a stand-alone real >estate scam until 1625 when it became a Crown Colony. If >saying something happened in 1616 in Virginia USA is wrong, >so is saying it happened in 1616 in Virginia Great Britain >or Virginia UK. At least by saying USA you put people on >the right continent. No sneezable trick these days. The point being? Sounds like you're in the camp that wants to label all locations with their modern hierarchies. I won't argue against that. A lot of people want to do that. Some people want more accuracy.

>How will this magic gazetteer *know* which "Somerset" is >meant if the only word given it is Somerset? It will NOT know. YOU will provide as much information as you know about the particular Somerset, and the place authority will give you all the possibilities that match what you know. If you restrict the Somerset to a country or a county or a "type" (eg, city, county, parish, village) or a time period or more than one of the above the gazetteer will give you a shorter list. There is no magic here. As I explained TWICE above, when you give a partial name you get back all the POSSIBLE resolutions.

"singhals" <singhals@erols.com> wrote in message news:mailman.1.1349187422.21626.gencmp@rootsweb.com... > Tony Proctor wrote: > > The obvious problem with creating hierarchies is -- who gets the final say > on what goes in? > > Then since clearly hierarchy means something different to each of us, does > your hierarchy begin in the Milky Way Galaxy and work its fumbling way > down to 123 West Main Street or does it go the other direction? In either > event, does a church parish out-rank a civil parish (where both exist -- > or, I guess, at all). > > And, in either event of either event -- how will the hierarchy indicate to > the reader that "Glaxon Parish" as a place-name is incomplete, or whether > said parish is civil or church? > > And yeah, we're in the wet weeds here, but these points have to be > considered. IME, the best time to find out about unsolvable problems is > before you commit significant time, effort, and/or money. > > Cheryl I can easily answer all of these questions Cheryl, but then I suspect you don't really want me to. If you happen to have ancestors from a different galaxy then I hope you include the names of those galaxies in your data :-) Tony Proctor

"Tom Wetmore" <ttw4@verizon.net> wrote in message news:6e17c48d-3582-4557-aee1-3bbcc72624d5@googlegroups.com... > Tony, > > Our discussions often boil down to me thinking you over analyze things, > and you thinking I under > analyze things! In this case I think we're in basic agreement. > > What you call a location seems to be what I think of just a spot on the > globe, completely devoid of name > or religion or geo-politics. This is what you mean by the 2D aspect of > place/location. Whether a location > should be just a spot, or a small area, or a large area I don't think > matters -- it's somewhere on the > globe we are interested in. That spot/area is effectively timeless, it's > been there throughout history > without regard to name, political control, or religion. > > Then comes the name/"place" dimension, which is, dimensionally, a forest > of overlapping containment- > based, named location trees that vary over the dimensions of time, > language, nationality and religion. > This seems more complex than your +1 indicates. The point here is there is > no simple containment > tree that works. The time and "purpose" dimensions require a much more > complex forest structure if we > truly wish to understand what a location has been called and what places > it has been considered to "be > in" over all of history. > > A place authority would be a representation of all those forests in all > those dimensions. Plug in a > location, output a list (actually a forest) of named-locations that > contain or contained that location. Specify the time period or the > religious component, and the authority could limit its output to the > appropriate places that would have encompassed the location at some > historical epoch. I don't > understand why you wouldn't be interested in entering a location into an > authority and then getting a > "history" of all the places that location has been "in" over history. For > me this is the FUNDAMENTAL > need for anyone interested in accurately understanding the places where > genealogical events occurred. > > I have a Place data type that I use in a variety of software, genealogical > and otherwise. A Place object is > simply a node in one of these forests. It can be contained by any number > of other Places and it may > contain any number of other Places. In "technical terms" this forest that > truly represents the "naming > history" of a place, is a potentially very complicated directed acyclic > graph (DAG), which must be the mathematical structure than any place > authority would use as its "database.' A single, "low level" Place > can therefore be a member of ANY NUMBER of hierarchies. This handles all > issues of parishes that cross > county boundaries, or in another context, national parks that are located > in more than one county. The > "gazetteer" itself, which can be thought of as the external data that > creates these graphs, is nothing > more than a text file that lists the thousands (ultimately millions) of > containment relationship between > JUST PAIRS of places, along with properties that specify type of place, > time dimension, language, etc. > > One lack of my software is that it doesn't have a way of dealing with > nameless locations, points or > areas. One must start with at least a single name. Clearly a real > authority must bridge the gap between > locations and names. With my software you could enter, say, Georgia, and > it would let you know that > you could be talking about a state in the USA or a country in Europe. You > could enter Kings with a type > of county and it would let you know all the states/provinces/countries > that contain places named Kings > County. That is the software can then take partially specified names and > then provide the lists of all > possible completely specified Places that correspond. If you are lucky > there would only be one such > "resolved Place;" if you aren't lucky then your data is ambiguous until > you learn more. > > Tom Wetmore I think we only disagree on the multiple hierarchy issue Tom. I believe that you can create a single hierarchy which includes geographic and administrative entities, and then represent the other information (e.g. ecclesiastical, political, judicial, etc) as attributes, or properties, of the leaves in that main hierarchy. This is working well for me at the moment. I have seen "nameless places", such as cottages in very rural landscapes that had neither house name or number, but these were generally addressed (at the time) by the name of the family living there. Tony Proctor

"pblair" <pblair@pcug.org.au> wrote in message news:9f9c9574-ff5f-4523-84bd-8d94ce96d5f5@googlegroups.com... > Be safe. > > I add a latitude and longitude (which seem to have been reasonably stable > over the years) and let folk find the place for themselves, in whatever > form it is... > > Paul > Finding coordinates for a historical place is generally not easy Paul, particularly if it no longer exists. You would still need to store the place name anyway so why not rely on a Place Authority to give you an agreed location for any given named place? Tony Proctor

In an associated thread I mentioned formats for gazetteers that could be used as a "database" for implementing multiple hierarchy place authorities. Here is a too simple example format, with a few examples to give an idea of a very simple approach. A complete gazetteer would obviously have many millions of entries. Example Format: uniqueId : name : timePeriod : language : type : parentId* Example Gazetteer File: 10101: North America : : en : Continent 34343: Europe : : en : Continent 11111: United States : 1776 to present : en : NationState: 10101 44444: United Kingdom: xxxx to xxxx : en : NationState: 34343 89999: Denmark : xxxx to xxxx : en : NationState : 34343 22222: New England : : en : InformalRegion : 11111 33333: Connecticut : 1776 to present : en : ProvinceState: 11111, 22222 55555: Connecticut Colony : 1636 to 1776 : en : Colony : 44444, 22222 34543: New London : 1636 to 1776 : en : County : 55555 34544: New London : 1776 to present : en : County : 33333 34643: New London : 1636 to 1776 : en : City : 34543 34643: New London : 1776 to present : en : City : 34544 66666: Great Britain : : en : Island : 34343 77777: Greenland : : en : Island : 10101 88888: Greenland : : en : Dependency: 89999 80808: Isle of Man : xxxx to xxxx : en : CrownDependency : 44444 81818: Andreas : xxxx to xxxx : en : CivilParish : 80808 Omit dates where the name is "timeless" (e.g., North America). There would be a relatively small number of types. I've suggested some of them here. Some names are used twice as part of different hierarchies. Names are ambiguous when not fully specified. It's the way the world works. Deal with it. In a real gazetteer some names would be used hundreds of times, fortunately each with a uniqueID. Note that United Kingdom is a NationState whereas Great Britain is "just" an Island in Europe. That's the way of it. Homework: Add England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland. What type would you give them? Try adding "British Isles" (what type would you give them) and handling both the NationState of Ireland and the Island of Ireland. Note how Greenland is both an Island (so in North America) and a member of the Danish Commonwealth (so "in" Denmark). Note how in the case of Greenland we need to worry about the difference between political containment and geographical containment. That is, Greenland, politically part of Denmark, is not geographically part of Denmark or Europe! Lots of complications, but not uncontrollable. Smart people can figure this stuff out. I've shown the tip of a large iceberg here. I've avoided certain issues, such as "official" names, "short form" names, which would require gazetteer entries to have more properties than are shown in this simple example. So the format would clearly need to have more "columns." How many do you think there would have to be? Political hierarchies will get real nasty real fast. Try to imagine what would be needed to cover all names found in what is today Poland over the past three centuries! This would be a massive undertaking, but I think the path is pretty clear. I already have some massive gazetteer files very similar to this format for a few of the software programs I have written. Tom Wetmore

cecilia wrote: > On Sun, 30 Sep 2012 21:41:22 -0400, singhals<singhals@erols.com> > wrote: > >> [...] >> When one is first looking into verifying data from a country >> not one's own [...] > > Or from a time not one's own. > > A nuclear family within my tree lived at 15 Stockbridge Terrace, > Pimlico for decades (1851-1891 at least). > > In 1901 they were at 160 Victoria Street, London. > > Looking at > (a) an 1839 map showing Stockbridge Terrace on a location that > appears to be on the the north side of the western end of the current > Victoria Street (built in the late 19C), and > (b) the location of the current postcode for 160 Victoria Street, > > I think it possible they did not move. I'm sure you're right. That sort of situation extends to one's own time as well. For example these three houses are Carr Terrace, beyond them are more houses comprising Brick Row (and in the 1851 census as such) but they all have Woodhead Road numbers. http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&ll=53.56188,-1.808607&spn=0.000349,0.000958&t=h&z=20&layer=c&cbll=53.561804,-1.808744&panoid=m8MIWtc_jzejM4dnI7P72w&cbp=12,284.27,,0,0 -- Ian The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang at austonley org uk

Tony Proctor wrote: > > "Tom Wetmore"<ttw4@verizon.net> wrote in message > news:6e17c48d-3582-4557-aee1-3bbcc72624d5@googlegroups.com... >> Tony, >> >> Our discussions often boil down to me thinking you over analyze things, >> and you thinking I under >> analyze things! In this case I think we're in basic agreement. >> >> What you call a location seems to be what I think of just a spot on the >> globe, completely devoid of name >> or religion or geo-politics. This is what you mean by the 2D aspect of >> place/location. Whether a location >> should be just a spot, or a small area, or a large area I don't think >> matters -- it's somewhere on the >> globe we are interested in. That spot/area is effectively timeless, it's >> been there throughout history >> without regard to name, political control, or religion. >> >> Then comes the name/"place" dimension, which is, dimensionally, a forest >> of overlapping containment- >> based, named location trees that vary over the dimensions of time, >> language, nationality and religion. >> This seems more complex than your +1 indicates. The point here is there is >> no simple containment >> tree that works. The time and "purpose" dimensions require a much more >> complex forest structure if we >> truly wish to understand what a location has been called and what places >> it has been considered to "be >> in" over all of history. >> >> A place authority would be a representation of all those forests in all >> those dimensions. Plug in a >> location, output a list (actually a forest) of named-locations that >> contain or contained that location. Specify the time period or the >> religious component, and the authority could limit its output to the >> appropriate places that would have encompassed the location at some >> historical epoch. I don't >> understand why you wouldn't be interested in entering a location into an >> authority and then getting a >> "history" of all the places that location has been "in" over history. For >> me this is the FUNDAMENTAL >> need for anyone interested in accurately understanding the places where >> genealogical events occurred. >> >> I have a Place data type that I use in a variety of software, genealogical >> and otherwise. A Place object is >> simply a node in one of these forests. It can be contained by any number >> of other Places and it may >> contain any number of other Places. In "technical terms" this forest that >> truly represents the "naming >> history" of a place, is a potentially very complicated directed acyclic >> graph (DAG), which must be the mathematical structure than any place >> authority would use as its "database.' A single, "low level" Place >> can therefore be a member of ANY NUMBER of hierarchies. This handles all >> issues of parishes that cross >> county boundaries, or in another context, national parks that are located >> in more than one county. The >> "gazetteer" itself, which can be thought of as the external data that >> creates these graphs, is nothing >> more than a text file that lists the thousands (ultimately millions) of >> containment relationship between >> JUST PAIRS of places, along with properties that specify type of place, >> time dimension, language, etc. >> >> One lack of my software is that it doesn't have a way of dealing with >> nameless locations, points or >> areas. One must start with at least a single name. Clearly a real >> authority must bridge the gap between >> locations and names. With my software you could enter, say, Georgia, and >> it would let you know that >> you could be talking about a state in the USA or a country in Europe. You >> could enter Kings with a type >> of county and it would let you know all the states/provinces/countries >> that contain places named Kings >> County. That is the software can then take partially specified names and >> then provide the lists of all >> possible completely specified Places that correspond. If you are lucky >> there would only be one such >> "resolved Place;" if you aren't lucky then your data is ambiguous until >> you learn more. >> >> Tom Wetmore > > I think we only disagree on the multiple hierarchy issue Tom. I believe that > you can create a single hierarchy which includes geographic and > administrative entities, and then represent the other information (e.g. > ecclesiastical, political, judicial, etc) as attributes, or properties, of > the leaves in that main hierarchy. > > This is working well for me at the moment. I have seen "nameless places", > such as cottages in very rural landscapes that had neither house name or > number, but these were generally addressed (at the time) by the name of the > family living there. The obvious problem with creating hierarchies is -- who gets the final say on what goes in? Then since clearly hierarchy means something different to each of us, does your hierarchy begin in the Milky Way Galaxy and work its fumbling way down to 123 West Main Street or does it go the other direction? In either event, does a church parish out-rank a civil parish (where both exist -- or, I guess, at all). And, in either event of either event -- how will the hierarchy indicate to the reader that "Glaxon Parish" as a place-name is incomplete, or whether said parish is civil or church? And yeah, we're in the wet weeds here, but these points have to be considered. IME, the best time to find out about unsolvable problems is before you commit significant time, effort, and/or money. Cheryl

Tony, I disasgree that things can be done with a single hierarchy, say based on modern times, that then points off to associated data to handle earlier time periods and other dimensions. Here's an example. Poland. The history of Poland is complex. Every location in Poland fits within an incredible number of different hierarchies. Locations have been in many countries over time (Poland, Germany [West Prussia], Austria, Russia, Lithuania, ...). When in those nations every location was in a separate political hierarchy. And each of those hierarchies changed over time as the political leaders rearranged boundaries. In parallel there were the religious hierarchies. Poland has been divided into catholic parishes, protestent arrangements, Jewish arrangements, all overlapping in time and in space. Towns and cities had/have a multiplicity of spellings depending upon the nationality of the speaker or the purpose of the hierarchy. I don't believe this complexity can be handled by a single hierarchical tree with associated information. If I am wrong, however, the job might be a bit easier, but I don't think so. Your "associated information" would have to become so complex in a case like Poland that I bet you'd throw up your hands and head for the graph solution. You can see the beauty of the solution that some people use, that is, record place names in terms of the place names in use today. It allows them to avoid this whole messy area! But I think it's pretty darn weird to record an event that occurred in Connecticut before the American revolution as having occurred in the United States. I record those events as occurring in Connecticut Colony (and I would add Great Britain as the country in the cases where it were needed). Tom Wetmore > I think we only disagree on the multiple hierarchy issue Tom. I believe that > you can create a single hierarchy which includes geographic and > administrative entities, and then represent the other information (e.g. > ecclesiastical, political, judicial, etc) as attributes, or properties, of > the leaves in that main hierarchy. > This is working well for me at the moment. I have seen "nameless places", > such as cottages in very rural landscapes that had neither house name or > number, but these were generally addressed (at the time) by the name of the > family living there. > > Tony Proctor

On Tuesday, October 2, 2012 10:17:03 AM UTC-4, singhals wrote: > The obvious problem with creating hierarchies is -- who gets > the final say on what goes in? Experts and historians do this work. Whoever provides the data. If it's full of errors we turn somewhere else. We depend upon the knowledge of experts for every aspect of our lives. > Then since clearly hierarchy means something different to > each of us, does your hierarchy begin in the Milky Way > Galaxy and work its fumbling way down to 123 West Main > Street or does it go the other direction? In either event, > does a church parish out-rank a civil parish (where both > exist -- or, I guess, at all). If you'd read what I wrote and understood it, you would realize we are talking about a forest of hierarchies, a directed graph of place names that can be used to handle multi-dimensions of time periods, languages, ecclesiastical dimensions, political dimensions and so on. Do you know what a graph is? This the basic mathematical underpinnings needed to provide the modeling for these services, and it is among the simplest of mathematical concepts to implement as a data structure and write algorithms for. It is the graph structures that allow multiple pure containment hierarchies to coexist. The parallel hierarchies have no "ranking" with respect to each other. They are different hierarchies. This is a subtlety you need to grasp before you can comment meaningfully. > And, in either event of either event -- how will the > hierarchy indicate to the reader that "Glaxon Parish" as a > place-name is incomplete, or whether said parish is civil or > church? Uh, by indicating it. I covered this in what I wrote before. You enter a partial place name. You do or do not try to limit that partial place name to a time, language, region, religion, etc. You push a button. Out comes all the fully qualified names from all the hierarchies in all the dimensions you are interested in. > And yeah, we're in the wet weeds here, but these points have > to be considered. IME, the best time to find out about > unsolvable problems is before you commit significant time, > effort, and/or money. > Cheryl It's not an unsolvable problem. The algorithms are simple. The issue is the creation of the multi- dimensional gazetteer, which is a massive data gathering task. I admit that that task, to be done completely, is a big job. But it can be addressed piecemeal by experts in different areas. The gazetteer can grow and expand over the time. All the "place authorities" that exist today can be thought of as more-or-less one-dimensional gazetteers. In my previous post I indicated that I had written software for the key "graph-node" data structure for use in a truly multi-dimensional place authority. This is not rocket science. There are plenty of examples of how these gazetteers can be formatted. In a future I may try to provide a few examples. Tom Wetmore

On Sun, 30 Sep 2012 21:41:22 -0400, singhals <singhals@erols.com> wrote: >[...] >When one is first looking into verifying data from a country >not one's own [...] Or from a time not one's own. A nuclear family within my tree lived at 15 Stockbridge Terrace, Pimlico for decades (1851-1891 at least). In 1901 they were at 160 Victoria Street, London. Looking at (a) an 1839 map showing Stockbridge Terrace on a location that appears to be on the the north side of the western end of the current Victoria Street (built in the late 19C), and (b) the location of the current postcode for 160 Victoria Street, I think it possible they did not move.

Be safe. I add a latitude and longitude (which seem to have been reasonably stable over the years) and let folk find the place for themselves, in whatever form it is... Paul

Tom Wetmore wrote: > What would be very handy, and someday we will get there, is software that will take as input any > point on the globe (specified by either latitude and longitude, or just clicking on an adequately > scaled map), that then outputs the compete history of all the many overlapping, possibly conflicting, > multi-lingual, set of geopolitical entities that ever surrounded that point. Such gazetteers are > showing up with limited scopes (e.g., history of counties in the United States; history of the > changing boundaries and "provinces" making up Canada over its full history), so one can anticipate > the wonder we will feel when such an application appears. Anyone dealing with an unfamiliar location in the UK would be well advised to Google for it in conjunction with genuki. In particular locations in Yorkshire are well served by the contributions of Colin Hinson - but please observe his T&Cs. -- Ian The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang at austonley org uk

"Tom Wetmore" <ttw4@verizon.net> wrote in message news:5669673b-9d86-430f-ba7f-74e19bd044b3@googlegroups.com... > To understand boundaries one must be an historian. If a genealogist truly > wants to learn the nature > of all boundaries of all geo-political-eclesiastical entities that > surrounded the areas where their > ancestors lived, either when their ancestors actually lived there, or as > things are today, or both they > must invest in learning the necessary history. Isn't that simply the > nature of the beast? It's fun to > bring up examples for the areas that we ourselves are experts, but it > doesn't accomplish much in > the long run. > > Some genealogists care deeply about understanding places and recording the > data by some system; > some don't. Some are happy just entering a name in field on a computer > screen. Doesn't do them > any harm after all if things aren't correct. > > What would be very handy, and someday we will get there, is software that > will take as input any > point on the globe (specified by either latitude and longitude, or just > clicking on an adequately > scaled map), that then outputs the compete history of all the many > overlapping, possibly conflicting, > multi-lingual, set of geopolitical entities that ever surrounded that > point. Such gazetteers are > showing up with limited scopes (e.g., history of counties in the United > States; history of the > changing boundaries and "provinces" making up Canada over its full > history), so one can anticipate > the wonder we will feel when such an application appears. > > Other than that, it's just slog, slog, slog to learn the history that is > needed. We all become experts > on small parts of the globe as we push back and find where our ancestors > came from. I would not > have guessed that I would ever know a lot about Andreas Parish on the Isle > of Man, or the towns in > Mongomeryshire, Wales, or the history of the fishing villages on > Newfoundland, but when I found my > ancestors there is was simply the logical result of my research. Hi Tom. I entirely agree with the concept of a Place Authority, and for historical research in general rather just family history. I really hope that we'll eventually have a consistent specification for such an Authority that can be implemented in a federated way across the globe. I'm one of those people that is almost as interested in the places as the people. However, I would find little use for specifying a location's coordinates and asking for a history of it. I view my data as a 2+1 dimensional set of places - 'places' being named points or areas deemed to have significance to people, and hence distinct from mere 'locations'. Ian already mentioned the temporal aspect. To give a few examples. The county of Staffordshire is a recognised entity, although its boundaries (and hence its centre point) have shifted over time. If my data mentions Staffordshire then it refers to the 'Staffordshire' at that time - I don't give the modern-day associated county in place of the historic designation since it's just wrong. I have many instances of a place that is a street (or even a house) that no longer exists. The location still exists but the place has long gone, and usually replaced by a new place. The point locations may have coordinates in 2-D but the places have a name and a representation in 2+1 D. What I would really like is an Authority that could resolve names in the context of a partial hierarchy (e.g. you may know the county but not the town, village, street, or whatever), and then be given the associated map reference, history, and full hierarchical designation. There is so much local knowledge of the fine-grained places that currently has nowhere for it to live. Imagine an Authority that allowed that local knowledge to be added to different parts of a Place Hierarchy (analogous to a collaborative family tree), and then being able to link place references from your family tree to the appropriate reference held by the Authority. I'm probably out on a limb here so I'll go back to sleep now Tony Proctor

singhals wrote: > When one is first looking into verifying data from a country not one's > own, it is very helpful to know whether "Woodlands" is a house, a > country, a church parish, or a county, or a local fish'n'chips joint. > That discovery is aided by the inclusion of identifiers of the level of > "house", "Parish", "county," "sanitary district", or even "Sagittarius > Arm". > Unfortunately it may mean several of these at the same time and at the same place. And the original source might not tell you, after all why bother to write down what everybody knows? -- Ian The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang at austonley org uk

Tony, Our discussions often boil down to me thinking you over analyze things, and you thinking I under analyze things! In this case I think we're in basic agreement. What you call a location seems to be what I think of just a spot on the globe, completely devoid of name or religion or geo-politics. This is what you mean by the 2D aspect of place/location. Whether a location should be just a spot, or a small area, or a large area I don't think matters -- it's somewhere on the globe we are interested in. That spot/area is effectively timeless, it's been there throughout history without regard to name, political control, or religion. Then comes the name/"place" dimension, which is, dimensionally, a forest of overlapping containment- based, named location trees that vary over the dimensions of time, language, nationality and religion. This seems more complex than your +1 indicates. The point here is there is no simple containment tree that works. The time and "purpose" dimensions require a much more complex forest structure if we truly wish to understand what a location has been called and what places it has been considered to "be in" over all of history. A place authority would be a representation of all those forests in all those dimensions. Plug in a location, output a list (actually a forest) of named-locations that contain or contained that location. Specify the time period or the religious component, and the authority could limit its output to the appropriate places that would have encompassed the location at some historical epoch. I don't understand why you wouldn't be interested in entering a location into an authority and then getting a "history" of all the places that location has been "in" over history. For me this is the FUNDAMENTAL need for anyone interested in accurately understanding the places where genealogical events occurred. I have a Place data type that I use in a variety of software, genealogical and otherwise. A Place object is simply a node in one of these forests. It can be contained by any number of other Places and it may contain any number of other Places. In "technical terms" this forest that truly represents the "naming history" of a place, is a potentially very complicated directed acyclic graph (DAG), which must be the mathematical structure than any place authority would use as its "database.' A single, "low level" Place can therefore be a member of ANY NUMBER of hierarchies. This handles all issues of parishes that cross county boundaries, or in another context, national parks that are located in more than one county. The "gazetteer" itself, which can be thought of as the external data that creates these graphs, is nothing more than a text file that lists the thousands (ultimately millions) of containment relationship between JUST PAIRS of places, along with properties that specify type of place, time dimension, language, etc. One lack of my software is that it doesn't have a way of dealing with nameless locations, points or areas. One must start with at least a single name. Clearly a real authority must bridge the gap between locations and names. With my software you could enter, say, Georgia, and it would let you know that you could be talking about a state in the USA or a country in Europe. You could enter Kings with a type of county and it would let you know all the states/provinces/countries that contain places named Kings County. That is the software can then take partially specified names and then provide the lists of all possible completely specified Places that correspond. If you are lucky there would only be one such "resolved Place;" if you aren't lucky then your data is ambiguous until you learn more. Tom Wetmore