On Thursday 02 February 2006 21:09, Martijn van Oosterhout wrote: >To the GP, your page is an interesting one and raises several >interesting points. In particular the one about the "person" being the >conclusion of the rest of the database. You essentially have a set of >facts "A married B in C on date D" and you're trying to correlate >these. In the end it's just a certain amount of guess work, especially >since back then they wern't that particular about spelling as they are >today. > >My naive view is that you're basically assigning trust values to each >fact and the chance that two citations refer to the same person. In >principle you'd be able to cross-reference all these citations and >build the structure quasi-automatically. I suppose in practice this is >done by hand. Yes it is. As I stated in the article, I'd like to quantify a 'participant' of an 'event' as a "vector in genealogy space", but I haven't really figured out a sensible entry mode for that evidence yet. For now, I'm trying to enter as much information as possible into the source citations. >As for your question, I think you're stuck with having a person ID. >Basically because you need to identify a person somehow. Given you >still have the original citiations, you can split a person into >multiple if the situation appears to not work out. > >One thing I find odd though, your "person" objects have no birthdate > or deathdate. Or birth place either. I've appropriated the model from my previous program, The Master Genealogist. I like the approach that the "person" entity should contain the least possible number of assertions. I've got views and functions that retrieves a primary birth and death date from the database automatically. > I would have thought these > elements would be fundamental in determining if two people are the > same, given that they can't change and people are unlikely to forget > them. Yes. But in 18th century genealogy, at least in Norway, you're unlikely to find a birth date and place in other records than the christening. As a matter of fact, the birth date wasn't usually recorded either, but as the christening usually took place within a week after birth, you've got a pretty good approximation. >Put another way, two people with the same birthday in the same place >with similar names are very likely to be the same. If you can >demostrate this is not the case that's another fact. In the end you're >dealing with probabilities, you can never know for sure. 18th century genealogy has a lot in common with crime investigation. You've basically got a few clues, and try to figure out a picture from the sparse evidence that may be found. I love that challenge, but it may be quite taxing sometimes. -- Leif Biberg Kristensen | Registered Linux User #338009 http://solumslekt.org/ | Cruising with Gentoo/KDE
