Richard Smith wrote: > Suppose you have two statements > "The Dunny-on-the-Wold parish register says John Smith was baptised > there on 3 Jan 1800" and "John Smith's gravestone says he was born on > 5 Jan 1800". If you've identified the two John Smiths as the same > person, you might like your genealogy program to draw the apparent > contradiction to your attention. Perhaps you mis-transcribed one? > Perhaps one of the sources is simply wrong? Perhaps you were mistaken > in thinking the two sources refer to the same person. Either way, > perhaps worth a second look. I can live with the notion that there are alternative alleged dates for a given event and that the discrepancy is currently unresolvable. But that can be another area in which existing data models fail. If a single date is an attribute of the event object then the only solution is to have multiple event objects for the same actual event which is an unsatisfactory representation. The requirement is to be able to record multiple dates against a single event object, preferably with some means of recording the reliability. Or to have an object for the event /record/ with a single date but to have an object of a separate class to represent the underlying event to which the various record objects can be linked. -- Ian The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang at austonley org uk

On 2011-05-12 22:58, Ian Goddard wrote: > Richard Smith wrote: ..... > I can live with the notion that there are alternative alleged dates for > a given event and that the discrepancy is currently unresolvable. But > that can be another area in which existing data models fail. If a single > date is an attribute of the event object then the only solution is to > have multiple event objects for the same actual event which is an > unsatisfactory representation. The requirement is to be able to record > multiple dates against a single event object, preferably with some means > of recording the reliability. Or to have an object for the event > /record/ with a single date but to have an object of a separate class to > represent the underlying event to which the various record objects can > be linked. > That is why in the Gendatam system an event can be standalone or linked to any number of people and/or evidence records and can have any number of dates. It is however in my experience rare for an event to be assigned more than one possible date. The links are scoped as Gentech-style assertion records that help tie down probabilites. However, I should point out that this sort of thing can get rather complicated if it is pursued to its logical conclusion. Peter