This morning in the shower I thought about my grandmother and wondered whether she’s been doing any genealogy lately. If she has, then of course I’d want to get a copy of her PAF file. That would then mean merging it with mine, or at least looking at the differences (including what’s new since her last update). The natural way to do that, I think, is visually. Imagine Photoshop layers: you have one file on one layer, and the next file on the next (and you could, in theory, compare even more files). There would have to be symbols overlaid on the chart so you could tell what doesn’t match up — one symbol/color meaning that it’s the same person but some of the dates/places aren’t the same, another meaning that it doesn’t look like it’s the same person, etc. Then you could overview the whole pedigree and see who you need to check. There would need to be a normal list-of-changes view as well, so that you don’t miss anything. But this seems to be a better way (a more natural way, at least) of comparing data.

Problem: there are people in the database who aren’t on the pedigree. (Namely, anyone who isn’t your direct ancestor.) Hmm… This is a problem, especially because I want Beyond to support non-family relationships as well (so you can say “Joe Clark was my friend in 2002,” or “Rick Magleby was Jane’s boss from 1995-1999″ or “Thomas Watkins bought land from Robert Shanks for $32.47 on 23 Jun 1832″). Why? Historical research needs it, to be thorough. That way you can see every person who’s connected to your ancestor in any way. (Lots of non-family relationships show up in the records, and it’d be nice to store those, because they can be of great value in finding clues that help further your research.)

Perhaps a circle/cloud view like Visual Thesaurus’s would work. You start with the Home person (#1, probably yourself) in the middle, and then the connections branch out like spokes in a wheel. The only issue with that is it’d be rather messy. I wonder if there’s a good and uncluttered way to represent a database like that…

More ideas: for the pedigree view (and this will apply to the whole-database view, once I figure out what it’ll be), I want the user to be able to zoom to any level. So instead of being set at four generations on a screen, you can zoom in/out and pan around (like in Illustrator or Photoshop). There’ll also be an Overview window off to the side that shows you the whole chart and pinpoints your current location on it (like a map, basically).

Finally, unlimited undo. I’d like to do a history list like in Photoshop, actually. The main reason is that if users feel secure and safe with the program — when they know that their data isn’t going to disappear and that they can undo anything they later regret — they’ll be more free to experiment and tinker with the data. And that’s where the good research starts to blossom.

Technorati Tags: genealogy, pedigree, Photoshop, Illustrator, Visual Thesaurus, PAF

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