Bob Velke wrote: > Tom said: > >> GEDCOM is a perfectly good standard. It may be old, but the kilogram >> is an old standard and enjoys widespread modern use. > > > For a lot of researchers, GEDCOM is far from "perfectly" anything. > ... > Bob Velke > Wholly Genes, Inc. > One of the reasons for the long development time of Gendatam Suite (see http://www.gendatam.com/ ) has been what to do for the best about Gedcom. The solution now in place is to provide a 'universal' gedcom reader (it works fairly well although is not 100% effective) and for gedcom output to provide 5.5 conformity. That is backed up by the more comprehensive Gendatam data structure. It does mean that on a strictly gedcom operation you may lose some of the data on output that was in the input file (or maybe it goes into notes where it is not so easily accessible), but that is not always a problem - it depends on what you are trying to do. The problem is with vendor extensions, but one should expect the 'core' data to be always handled correctly. One development test with Gendatam Suite has been the 'multiple round-trip'. This works as follows: import your gedcom file them write it out as a new gedcom file. This output file will differ textually from the original for all sorts of reasons, not just data loss. Re-import this file and output again as a new file. Does this second new file differ from the first new file? Repeat the cycle a few more times and see if any differences arise. The point of all that is to see how stable the data handling is beyond the initial cycle. If you want to keep all the data you have successfully imported, you need to save it as a gendatam file, not gedcom. A feature of Gendatam Suite, intended to ease difficulties, is the principle of providing data access. This means that the native gendatam file format is published. Also that data is accessible on screen and may be output in a variety of ways including as a plain-text report file. The intention is to allow people who have a reasonable degree of computer literacy to access data in a way convenient and useful to them. In summary, I don't think there is a solution to the Gedcom standards issue unless the user has a reasonable degree of computer literacy and is prepared to use it. In practice this often seems to involve using multiple programs as a toolkit to provide the required functionality, but that is just real-world computing. Regards Peter