Hello all, I know less about the Genealogical Data Model than some of you do, but I can see another set of differences.
GEDCOM and any XML representation of it is designed to store the information in what you might call a "family file", or the kind of information that is typically captured by any one of a number of genealogical data storage programs on the market. GEDCOM's, and presumably XML representations of them, are in general highly structured files, with an exception for notes and a few other things where there is much more in the way of free text. The GENTECH data model, as I understand it, could perhaps be applied to what I consider to be unstructured data, or free form text. Hans is this year's GENTECH Scholar, and this is his scholarship project. I was one of the two GENTECH Scholars last year, and would have benefitted from the work Hans is doing had our projects been reversed in order. I am tagging unstructured documents (narratives, etc.) with some basic tags such as names, dates and places. I presented my project at GENTECH 2002, and also at the Family History Workshop at BYU. It is my belief that the outcome of Hans's project will be an XML representation (be it DTD or schema or whatever) that could be used to tag the same unstructured documents that I am now working with. His project is creation of the XML representation; my project was the use of Natural Language Processing techniques to tag unstructured documents with SGML or XML tags in order to facilitate extraction of genealogical information from those documents. Because there was no set of appropriate tags already in existence, I made up my own. I think my project would have been a lot better had Hans's XML representation been available to me at the time. So, I look forward to the outcome of this project, in the hope that I can one day make use of it. I am also subscribed to the GenealogyXML list that Michael contributes heavily to, but mostly sit quietly in the background. -- Mary D. Taffet Syracuse University Ph.D. Student/School of Information Studies Research Analyst/Center for Natural Language Processing 4-230 Center for Science & Technology Syracuse, NY 13244-4100 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://web.syr.edu/~mdtaffet/ _______________________________________________ gdmxml mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://fugal.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gdmxml
