On 2011-05-21 22:15, Tom Wetmore wrote: > Peter, > > I do tend to hyperbole, so thanks for calling me out! > > The Gramps program allows you to add "events" to a database in a standalone manner (I believe). Later you can link those events to the persons. It's still a "person-based" system. > > As Wes pointed out, there is nothing preventing a user of "ordinary" programs creating separate persons for each "evidence person" and then merging them into the final person later when they decide who is who. This is what I have to do with my program now. The problem with this approach is that once you merge you loose your research history. We need nondestructive merges, which I believe is best done by just building up trees of person records. > > I will look up the Gendatam program. Thanks for the tip. > > Tom Wetmore In my experience merging should be regarded as a one-way process, if you do it, you need to be confident you will not want to revert. An inappropriate merge can be impossible to recover from without removing and re-entering amounts of data. A halfway house would be to have links or groups to bring the relevant records together in a controlled way. How much further you go depends on how purist you want to be about data and reasoning trails. I am all for working to eliminate such links by merging. The merge doesn't (or shouldn't) destroy the original evidence although it may discard some of the deductions made along the way. However, I am not offended by unmerged records. Peter

On Sunday, May 22, 2011 5:46:43 AM UTC-4, Peter J. Seymour wrote: > On 2011-05-21 22:15, Tom Wetmore wrote: > > Peter, > > > > I do tend to hyperbole, so thanks for calling me out! > > > > The Gramps program allows you to add "events" to a database in a standalone manner (I believe). Later you can link those events to the persons. It's still a "person-based" system. > > > > As Wes pointed out, there is nothing preventing a user of "ordinary" programs creating separate persons for each "evidence person" and then merging them into the final person later when they decide who is who. This is what I have to do with my program now. The problem with this approach is that once you merge you loose your research history. We need nondestructive merges, which I believe is best done by just building up trees of person records. > > > > I will look up the Gendatam program. Thanks for the tip. > > > > Tom Wetmore > > In my experience merging should be regarded as a one-way process, if you > do it, you need to be confident you will not want to revert. An > inappropriate merge can be impossible to recover from without removing > and re-entering amounts of data. A halfway house would be to have links > or groups to bring the relevant records together in a controlled way. > How much further you go depends on how purist you want to be about data > and reasoning trails. I am all for working to eliminate such links by > merging. The merge doesn't (or shouldn't) destroy the original evidence > although it may discard some of the deductions made along the way. > However, I am not offended by unmerged records. > > Peter Peter, My concerns are only that 1) evidence be codified into a useful form in our databases; 2) our conclusion persons be formed only from information taken from evidence; and 3) that the evidence not be modified or destroyed. My answer to these needs is quite simple, persona records to hold the evidence and person trees with persona records at the leaves to hold the reasoning and conclusions. The evidence is not merged with this approach. There may be other workable arrangements, but I am convinced the methods I have outlined most naturally mimic and therefore support the genealogical research process. I have steered clear of bringing the concept of events into this, but they are also key. My method includes event records at the evidence level as well (since so much evidence describes events involving persons in multiple roles, rather than just persons). Persona records therefore do not always occur in isolation, but often as constellations of persona records with an event ("eventa"?) record that binds them to a time and place and assigns them roles, allowing the personas to have context sensitive attributes (e.g., age at event, residence at event, and so on). And of course, the roles infer the relationships between the personas we are most interested in discovering. Tom Wetmore

Peter J. Seymour wrote: > > In my experience merging should be regarded as a one-way process, if you > do it, you need to be confident you will not want to revert. Coming from a scientific background I have real problems with this view. Any conclusion is simply the holder's best summary of available data at the time. It is open to being falsified by better data becoming available and hence the required confidence you mention must be lacking. -- Ian The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang at austonley org uk

On Sunday, May 22, 2011 6:07:23 AM UTC-4, Ian Goddard wrote: > Peter J. Seymour wrote: > > > > In my experience merging should be regarded as a one-way process, if you > > do it, you need to be confident you will not want to revert. > > Coming from a scientific background I have real problems with this view. > Any conclusion is simply the holder's best summary of available data > at the time. It is open to being falsified by better data becoming > available and hence the required confidence you mention must be lacking. > > -- > Ian > > The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang > at austonley org uk Ian, Of course, I agree with you. The question is, should the evidence we use to make our genealogical conclusions appear in our databases as entities of their own, and if they should, what in what form should they appear? Today's programs don't allow it. Some, like Gramps, have an event record that can be used for the "eventa" concept (see my recent response to Peter), but not an independent (e.g., never merged or modified) "persona" concept. The question is, do we need/want the codified evidence records as separate records in our databases or not? My answer is a resounding yes. There are many opponents to the idea, however. One camp, represented by some of the Better GEDCOM contributors, believe that evidence, if it be codified into our databases at all, should be included within the source record of the source that the evidence came from, maybe codified ("marked up") or maybe just as unstructured notes. This is better than nothing, but evidence in that form is very hard to compute with. Tom Wetmore

On May 22, 10:46 am, "Peter J. Seymour" <[email protected]> wrote: > In my experience merging should be regarded as a one-way process, if you > do it, you need to be confident you will not want to revert. Unfortunately, that's true in a lot of software, and it is one of the biggest reasons why a lot of existing software is inadequate for serious research. How can I possibly be certain that I've correctly associated the personae mentioned in various source records into the correct individuals? Sometimes the evidence is obvious and it's unlikely that I'll want to unmerge the individuals. But often, especially in earlier times, the research process is a continual cycle of finding new evidence and re-evaluating earlier conclusions. Software that can't cope with that is worse than useless -- without the software, you'd go through that process manually, but with existing software, you can't easily do the re-evaluation part of the cycle at all. Richard