Data transfer formats
Yesterday I was thinking about genealogical interchange formats, because Beyond will need to send diffs back and forth (between the server and client). GEDCOM is the current standard, but it’s old (the specification was written in 1996). Enter XML. It’s flexible, very well-supported, and it’s nice to work with. Sticking with GEDCOM is like using PCX files (remember those?) instead of anti-aliased PNGs. Not good.
So, there are a few XML standards out there, but none have replaced GEDCOM yet. Why? I don’t know. But it’s time for a new standard to emerge.
That said, what needs to happen is close inspection of the existing standards to find out where they succeed and (more important) where they fail. And it wouldn’t hurt to examine other standards that have taken off like wildfire (RSS, PNG, etc.) and see what made them work. Is it just application support? Is it accompanying tutorials and articles? Is it name recognition? Hmm…
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I need to look at this area also. I haven’t seen the XML standards yet, but semantic web concepts look relevant. In fact, I just learned that RSS was originally based on RDF, which is an XML format tied heavily to the semantic web.
There has been a long discussion of this and other topics on the GenealogyXML Yahoo group [1]. In fact, they’re in the middle of discussing XML and RDF right now. It’s a complicated issue, and the main problem seems to be a lack of leadership and/or resources. Specifications take leadership, technical knowledge, and resources. There doesn’t appear to be anywhere to find all 3 elements in the same place or organization. It seems blatantly obvious there should be one, it just isn’t happening.
[1] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GenealogyXML/
Thanks for the link! I think I belonged to that mailing list before my mission when I worked for Ancestry, but that was a while ago and I’d forgotten all about it. :)
As for developing a new standard, I wonder what it would take to make it happen…