Re: Books, db designs, i/f designs, hosting & software for web access to GECDOM

Further to the point, any forward-thinking genealogy database design would start 
by tossing GEDCOM.  Practically every existing genealogy program I know of has 
constrained itself approximately to the limitations of what GEDCOM can represent 
and how it organizes things, which severely limits growth.  Standards for 
interchange are great, but there's no reason we can't design better open 
standards.  GEDCOM is like the ASCII standard when we could have Unicode. -- 
Darren Duncan

Darren Duncan wrote:
> Ron Savage wrote:
>> The subject is already long enough, but of course I really mean to
>> include non-GEDCOM-based genealogical data too.
>>
>> My purpose here is fishing for ideas re all material related to the
>> subject. And I do emphasis the topic is /managing/ such data.
>>
>> I can remember a few years ago - when PCs were slower and RAM was much
>> more limited - of the (my!) machine struggling to cope with the data
>> file of the European royal family db.
>>
>> So, what are people using these days?
>>
>> Also, if there is any compilation of what extras you'd like GEDCOM to
>> include, tell me.
> 
> The short answer is that I'm making a new database program especially 
> suited to genealogy, and intended to be better for that than any 
> existing one, but it is also more generic in design so to handle 
> organizing important data for any kind of research.  The target user 
> base is professionals, who would most likely appreciate what I bring to 
> the table, but it is also intended to be usable by laypeople.  One 
> primary feature is that all kinds of entities, attributes, and 
> relationships are user-defined.  Another is that source citation is 
> recursive, so you can describe sources in all the flexibility you 
> describe what they way. The design is somewhat in the middle between a 
> general ontology modeler and a subject-specialized program; it is more 
> formally structured than a wiki but more flexible than specific-subject 
> databases.  I started working on this back in 1998, but then this work 
> went on hiatus while I first complete my Muldis D programming language 
> for databases, over which I will implement the research database 
> application / model. -- Darren Duncan