[tei-council] Personographies

[James Cummings]

M. J. Driscoll wrote:
> Dear Council members,
> 
> The preliminary report of the Personography group, based on research done by 
> Eva Wedervang-Jensen, is now available for your perusal at http://www.tei-
> c.org/Activities/PERS/persw02.xml. Please note that this is still very much 
> work in progress; there have been some formatting problems, in particular with 
> the tables, but I hope to have these sorted out before long.

I think this is a useful and interesting report (and when you it is ready I will
be pointing several interested parties to it).

I would like to add a gloss on one part, which is that the LDS's GEDCOM XML beta
seems to have basically frozen (in that little work has been done on it since
the creation of the initial draft in 2002).  It has, unfortunately, been met
with a most deafening silence by the genealogical community at large.  Those
already interested in XML, like the participants of the GenealogyXML mailing
list, see that all it really does is take the previous (and extremely
widely-used by almost every genealogical software program) GEDCOM standards
(esp. 5 or 5.5) and turn it into XML.  It doesn't really exploit the
possibilities of being in XML.  It's take-up in commercial software and thus by
the genealogical community is extremely limited.

I appreciate the document couldn't cover all the possibilities for formats out
there.  Another format it may have wished to look at is the (zipped XML) format
used by the GRAMPS software.[1] (gramps.sourceforge.net)

-James
[1] But that said GRAMPS basically uses:
 <!ELEMENT name    (first?, last?, suffix?, title?)>
which really doesn't add much.