Jeni's Musings

Have you considered the idea of evidences supporting assertions?

Evidences have interpretations, which backup assertions (or claims) of existence of individuals or relationships. [I hope I haven’t misused the word assertion]

Most genealogy systems record assertions of individuals or relationships as fact which is problematic, and provides no simple way for recognizing or resolving conflicts, or even safely maintaining conflicts indefinitely!! Some allow recording of supporting evidences and allow doubts to be expressed freestyle.

The large problem is the merging of individual researchers “trees of doubt” into a larger tree of doubt.

Historic individuals can only be represented by themselves (and they’re usually not around to bestow their identity on the various assertions) but researchers may agree (and later disagree) on whether or not the same individual would accept the assertions (or claims) as referring to themselves - or in other words “we’re looking at the same person”

Each researcher then must have their own view of the tree and own definition of assertions which comprise an identity; and may have aliases which refer to an identity record of another researcher which probably uses many of the same assertions.

While the assertions may be semantically identical (or similar - perhaps some assert to a lesser degree of accuracy) they may be based on a largely common set of interpretations which may be based on a largely common set of evidences.

And it all wants versioning! So if a researcher A accepts from researcher B evidence Ba and interpretation Ba1 and assertion Ba1c and identity Ba1c99 and then researcher B re-interprets the evidence as Ba2 for assertion Ba2p to support and add information to individual Ba2p238, researcher A will need to be able to see the change and follow the conclusion and change of B or not. And then change their mind later if B is discredited, ore evidence is found, etc.

What are you thoughts on that>