Core Concepts Exploratory Group
Note: This group is currently suspended to allow us to work on sources & citations, per our priorities. This page exists as an archive only.
The Core Concepts Exploratory Group (or CCEG) is tasked with carrying out exploratory work into the core genealogical concepts pertaining to persons, their intrinsic and extrinsic properties, the events in their lives, and the relationships they have with other persons. The Technical Standing Committee have appointed Justin York to be Coordinator of this group and provided the group with directives governing its operation. Justin says:
Work in the CCEG will be carried out in two phases. First we will document and analyze how existing formats model persons, events, and relationships. The analysis will include an unbiased discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the approach. In the second phase we will use all of the information we have gathered to discuss and generate a formal project team proposal to guide the FHISO’s future standard development process in these areas.
We have a repository in Github where we will maintain our fork regarding the first phase. Github was chosen due to its simple collaboration features and its ability to handle markdown.
The repository was seeded with mostly empty files for 6 well known models. The files in the GEDCOM folder were filled out a little bit more than the others to show how the analysis could be structured, though we’re not restricted to that format. I expect our analysis to go beyond the 6 initial models. Feel free to suggest additions via the mailing list or a pull request on Github. BetterGedcom has a good list of additional models and can even serve as a starting place for documentation.
If you would like to assist in documenting or analyzing a model, we suggest that you tell us on the core-concepts mailing list so that you can coordinate with others also interested in working on that model. Otherwise you might duplicate work that is currently being done.
We do not know how long the CCEG work will take. We will take all the time we need since our work will have a strong bearing on almost all future work of FHISO. Thank you for your support of the CCEG.