Having thought about it some more, I’ve decided to go with a loose data model. The advantage is flexibility: people will be able to store whatever they need to, in a way that makes sense to them. As far as interoperability, yes, I think there will be some problems, but I have a feeling they won’t be too bad, especially with the template system (where there’ll be “expected” fields, like “First Name” and “Gender” and such). Another concern is data analysis, but I have some ideas on that.

Let me see if I can describe this clearly. When you go to the detail page for an individual (or a family, or an event), you’ll be able to organize the information about that person into groups (”Vital Events,” “Other Information,” whatever you want to call them). Each group contains items, which are either metadata (key/value pairs like “Hair color”/”brown” or “Religion”/”Baptist”), events (which in turn contain dates, places, and other metadata about the event), or research items (to-do lists, images, files, notes, etc.). You can order the groups and items any way you want via drag-and-drop.

I’m not entirely sure this’ll even work, but I’ll go forward with it and see how the tests go. If it flops, I’ll fix it. Collaboration could get interesting… Granted, I don’t think everyone is going to move things around all the time, and I suspect that most will stick with the standard template (vital events first — birth, christening, death, burial, etc. — and so on). But the flexibility’s there for those who need it. If you want to add a “Got Eagle Award” event, you can. If you want to add a to-do list for a particular ancestor (or a particular family), you can. If you want to add a table with census results from 1830 to 1870 for your ancestor, you can put it right there with the rest of his data, if that helps you. (And if it doesn’t help you, you can put it on a research page instead, keeping things separate.) My goal with Beyond is to set up as loose a framework as possible, just the foundation, and then get out of the way and let users do things the way they want to do them.

Technorati Tags: Beyond, genealogy

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