Haines Brown wrote: > Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org> writes: > >> One of the problems with data display in modern genealogy programs is >> that there is usually no way to communicate fuzzy truth. In Legacy, I >> can assign a confidence level to a source for a particular datum, but >> unless someone digs down into the innards of my data and looks at that >> confidence level, they'll never see it - it doesn't figure into any of >> the displays or reports above the obscure footnote level that in fact >> probably nobody will ever read, including me. So I never bother >> filling it in. > > Very interesting. What you are saying is that a print (printed page or > on a browser) cannot accurately reflect the reality of the lineage with > all its uncertainties. Normally when one prints something, what is > printed is static, unambivalent. Is it possible to print uncertainty? A > conventional way might be to use a dotted line rather than a solid line, > or lines with different colors, although that would be unconventional > and would require the display of a color key to indicate degrees of > uncertainty. The root problem here is that the traditional genealogical presentation standards were devised to present certainties. A document was likely to be used to illustrate a patron's descent from a notable ancestor. The patron wouldn't be pleased to have a representation that showed it wasn't clear that he was so descended. If we want to show finer nuances we need to devise alternative representations. One approach I've used to summarise a lot of information has been to draw boxes to represent families with links from the child of one family to the parent of the next generation. Where it's not clear which child in the earlier generation was the parent in the next I could draw links to each alternative. It would be perfectly possible to annotate such a link with one's thoughts about its probability. In practical terms I used (or misused!) Enterprise Architect, a UML package for this, largely because it was to hand. The families were represented by class symbols with the parents' names as the class title and childrens' names (and DoB) as attribute names. As EA allows a link to be pinned to a specific point on the symbol's boundary I could ensure that a link was adjacent to the correct child. EA allows notes to be added to the links - and to the families themselves. As an added refinement EA could be persuaded to allow symbols from different diagram types; I used the Synch symbol from the state diagram palette to handle the situation where I had two children of the same name on one generation and two fathers of the same name in the next but no information as to which was which. Such a diagram is, of course, static but could be revised as one's views changed with additional information. -- Ian Hotmail is for spammers. Real mail address is igoddard at nildram co uk