Peter, I've read all the Gendatum pages, and now I don't think you called me out. Maybe you can convince me. I don't see any good way that Gendatum can handle the persona concept, which in my mind is the hallmark of handling record-based genealogy. A persona is "codified evidence," that is, all the information that can be gleaned about a single person from a single item of evidence. It becomes a record in a database that is indexed, that can be searched for and indexed by name, that can be searched for and indexed by any date that might be mentioned in the evidence, that can be searched for and indexed by any place mentioned in the evidence, that can be searched for and indexed by any property of the person mentioned in the evidence. Does Gendatum handle these kinds of records? These are not the Gendatum concept of a person record, since those records are supposed to represent real persons, in other words, "conclusion persons" as I mentioned before. Looking at the diagram of the Gendatum model and reading the documentation in detail, I can't see how these kinds of records can be added to the database. Let me ask it this way. Say you collected 75 records about persons with names you were interested in, but you didn't yet know if they were the persons you were interested in. What could you do with Gendatum with respect to those 75 records? I assume you would want to be able to access all the information in those records quickly by computer, so you wouldn't want them just as paper copies or as image files. I assume you would want them codified in some way as records in your database, so you could search through them, sort them, group them into different groups and arrangements as you hypothesized about the real persons they might represent. What would you do with this information to help you do your reasoning and help you make your conclusions? I believe that how this question is answered defines whether a genealogical application is "just" conclusion based, or whether it also supports the evidence part of genealogy. As I said, most genealogical applications don't give you a good way to support this kind of evidence data. What you are "supposed" to do with nearly all genealogical program today, is to look at the physical evidence, then automatically know as if by magic exactly what real person that evidence applies to, and then simply add whatever new information you learned about the person from that evidence to the proper person record in your database. So evidence only appears in your database as attributes of other records. If Gendatum answers the question this way, and it looks to me like it does, then it is a conclusion-based system pretty similar to the others. But if Gendatum has a way to add those 75 records in such a way that the genealogist can truly use them, reason about them, rearrange them, build them into real person records, then I'd agree that Gendatum "crosses the chasm" (as this problem has been characteristic on the Ancestor Insider blog). I'd recommend that people read the "Crossing the Chasm" blog entries, as this is exactly the "first requirement" that was brought up by Richard Smith in the original post on this thread. Tom Wetmore