genealogy-brainstorming

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Revision as of 11:30, 27 September 2007 by AndyMabbett (talk | contribs) (→‎Document types: example)
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Genealogy Brainstorming

Contributors

Building blocks

Since genealogy is about people and their relationships, it is likely that any genealogical microformat will be built from hCard and XFN microformats; with hCalendar used for dates such as marriages and divorces.

Document types

Genealogy documents on the web tend to fall into one of several types:

  • A family tree with many members (e.g. [1]).
  • A page for an individual, listing their ancestors and descendants for one generation in each direction, plus their spouse(s) and, sometimes, their sibling(s) (e.g. [2], [3]).
  • As above, but for a couple (e.g. [4])
  • Prose pages which may discuss the families of one or more, sometimes unrelated, individuals (not necessarily in the context of genealogy) (e.g. [5]).

Gender

To make life easier for publishers, the following values could all equate, without requiring the use of abbr to:

Male

  • male
  • he
  • man
  • m
  • son
  • father
  • husband
  • brother
  • uncle
  • nephew
  • grandfather/ grand-father / great-grand-father etc.
  • grandson/ grand-son / great-grand-son etc.
  • ...

Female

  • female
  • she
  • woman
  • f
  • fem
  • wife
  • daughter
  • mother
  • sister
  • aunt
  • niece
  • grandmother/ grand-mother / great-grand-mother etc.
  • granddaughter/ grand-daughter / great-grand-daughter etc.
  • ...

Issue

  • What about other languages?
  • Gender reassignment and other edge cases
    • Outside the 80/20 cut-off
    • Could use abbr

Relationships

XFN has some family rel values: "parent", "child", "sibling", "spouse".

Although, from existing publishing practices, it seems likely that the above ("primary") relationships are more commonly expressed than secondary relationships ("aunt", "grand-father") when linking from one page to another, additional values may be required (see above for further examples). These could, of course, be used outside a genealogy microformat, as with other XFN values.

Non-marriage partnerships and short-term liaisons should also be catered for (for the parents of illegitimate children).

In addition to the gender-neutral primary relationships already in XFN, gender-specific terms may be required ("father" and "mother" for "parent", for example). There might also be a need for "step-sibling", "step-mother" and "half-sibling", etc.

See also: xfn-brainstorming#Extending_family_relationships

Date of death

Inevitably, more of our ancestors are dead than alive.

Since non-genealogical web pages also publish death dates, it is proposed that hCard be extended to incorporate them. See hcard-date-of-death

Date of baptism

Older records, from times when registration of births was not carried out, rely on baptism records, A date-of-baptism property is thus required. This could be added to hCard, or be specific to a genealogy microformat, and should be based on hCards "bday".

See also