RE: [Phpgedview-talk] XML genealogy format

[John F. <Joh...@ne...>]

Hi Alex,

The first thing that popped in my head when I read this email was if you
had looked at any of the other XML standards for genealogy such as
XgenML or GEDCOM v6?  Would it be better to look at one of those that
others also support?  On the other hand if gramps actually exports data
in an XML format (I don't know of other programs that do) then is there
any reason to switch to another standard?

PhpGedView uses GEDCOM as its base data model, so in order for PGV to
support importing XML it would have to translate the XML back into
GEDCOM at least for now.  In the future, the goal is to have the data
abstract enough that it could be stored in an XML format.  Maybe a good
place to start would be an XML export from PGV that could then be
imported into gramps.

Anytime you do a translation, there is going to be some data loss.  That
is why PGV stores data in raw GEDCOM format.  We don't lose anything
trying to convert gedcom into an internal data model.  But we there
would probably still be some data loss in the translation from gedcom to
XML.

I think that this type of collaboration between projects would be a good
thing.  I also think that we can get something going sooner than the
commercial software can.

Is there any documentation about your XML standard that we can read up
on?

Thanks,
--John


-----Original Message-----
From: php...@li...
[mailto:php...@li...] On Behalf Of Alex
Roitman
Sent: Friday, October 21, 2005 3:46 PM
To: php...@li...
Cc: Don Allingham
Subject: [Phpgedview-talk] XML genealogy format

Hello,

I am a member of the development team of GRAMPS, a personal
desktop genealogy program that is Free/Open source.

We are constantly facing problems of supporting users who
come with their data in GEDCOM format created by various software.
The limitations of the GEDCOM format are preventing the lossless
data transfer between the programs. Different programs are extending
the GEDCOM standard in different ways and these extensions are
sometimes hard to learn about.

We would like to develop an open XML genealogy data format.
We have an existing XML data format that used to be our primary
format. Lately we switched to using BSDDB for storage, but we
still maintain our XML for transferring data between the versions.

We feel that this format would be a good starting point for
developing cross-application XML format for genealogy. We know
that similar attempts were done before and did not get anywhere.
However, our situation is better than most, because we already
have a working implementation and it is not just the proposal.

We would like to invite the phpgedview developers to collaborate
with us on developing such a format. It seems that we should be
able to find common language with fellow Free software developers
sooner than those of commercial software.

While we realize that GEDCOM is a de-facto standard, however
poor it is, we would be thrilled if the phpgedview developers
were interested in adding support for our format and/or giving
us feedback on the format it would be great.

If you might be interested in collaborating on this, please
let us know. You may either reply to me personally, to this list,
or post to our list at gra...@li...
whatever works for you.

Thanks in advance,
Alex

--=20
Alexander Roitman   http://www.gramps-project.org