Re: [Gramps-users] harvesting family details

[Alex R. <sh...@al...>]

On Thu, 2004-06-17 at 16:17, Nick Rout wrote:
> I have a fairly extensive family tree, even among those still alive. I'd
> like to record it all, but thought the most efficient way would be to
> set up a web page. I could send all my relatives a login and password,
> and ask them to  fill in the details of their dates of birth, marriages,
> kids, ancestors etc=20
>=20
> Has anyone seen anything like this done before? Preferably open source
> of course, and able to dump the info directly into a database or file
> compatible with gramps.=20

While you can create a static web page from the gramps database, it's
not too much use for enetring the data :-(

Right now the work is being done to debug and polish the real database
backend for gramps. So far only the Berkeley database (bsddb) is
supported. The plans for the future include creating generic database
interface that could use any SQL database (postgres, mysql, what have
you). At that point, I can see how the database could be dumped and
updated from the web site using some scripting language. But this is far
in the future :-)

At the moment, you may be better off producing reports and sending text
files (or OOo or PDF or whatever esle format) to your relatives and
asking them to fill in the blanks. Then you could copy and paste.

Or you can export your tree into GEDCOM and send it to the
computer-savvy relatives who have genealogical software. Any
genealogical program should be able to import GEDCOM and then export
modified data into GEDCOM. Then you would import their data and merge
the duplicates. Hopefully, in the near future, we will have the ability
to open two database at a time and copy acros the databases.

Alex

--=20
Alexander Roitman   http://ebner.neuroscience.umn.edu/people/alex.html
Dept. of Neuroscience, Lions Research Building
2001 6th Street SE, Minneapolis, MN  55455
Tel (612) 625-7566   FAX (612) 626-9201