RE: [Phpgedview-talk] XML genealogy format

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

John,

Thanks for your response!

On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 17:01 -0600, John Finlay wrote:
> 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?=20

Nobody supports those. GEDCOM 6 is abandoned unfinished,
and a variety of the proposed XML formats are nothing but
words. Our format has been working for many users for
some years now. In fact, it was our primary format up
to last year.

>  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?

We are happy with our format, but we're looking for a broader
format to enable lossless transfer between different
software. GEDCOM has numerous limitations, leading to the
data loss on import/export with most software.

XML is a very appealing choice for such an open format,
and since we already have an XML genealogical format,
we thought that maybe we will start from there, if
anybody else is interested :-)

> 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.

I see. This can already be done. All programs including
GRAMPS can write into GEDCOM. The data gets lost, however.

>   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.
>=20
> 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 guess my point is that we'd like to have a better format
than GEDCOM, not convert to and from GEDCOM. Converting back and
forth makes any new exchange format meaningless.

> 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.
>=20
> Is there any documentation about your XML standard that we can read up
> on?

This page has formal documentation: DTD and RELAX NG schema:
   http://www.gramps-project.org/xml/1.0.0/

The example data file can be found here:
   http://www.gramps-project.org/files/data.gramps
It's actually very self-explanatory.

If you're still interested then we should definitely work
on this. If something in GRAMPS format does not seem
reasonable, we can discuss it and change it in the
new format. But ultimately, I think XML is a much
better choice for a common ground between different
software, for a number of reasons. If OpenDocument
could do it for the word processing, why can't we
do it with genealogy?

Alex

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