Not totaly related to the “Do i need more than one tree for this?” thread (but a little bit anyway) so I open this new one, and regardless of reports, I think gramps needs us to define our usage of it, our workflows, take how to notes of our own usage, define what tags are used for, define how to use user defined attributes or events or… Gramps is a set of tools everyone can use in its own way but to be powerful using it in an advanced manner we have to standardize things -researches attributes, tags, filters, …- and take notes, describe, what we want and what we have to do to get them working that way.
I think too there are at least three data flows to record and one set of tools to define to work on with them:
Data flows:
- Genealogical data : Gramps is made for, we just have to store these data into all gramps predefined objects
- Informations about genealogical data: stored into standard gramps objects or into user defined objects based on standard ones (non standard attribute or event name/type, non standard family relationship type, etc)
- Hypotheses informations : fully stored into user defined objects (research notes, research attributes and tags, …) may be with something special to recognize them (some prefix like RESEARCH or something like that → needs naming conventions)
Work flow:
- tools to make it possible to match/to work with the previous data ; fully user defined using previous objects, standard ones or user defined ones. Uses a lot of filters which needs to be standardized too (naming conventions…)
I tend to think that tags are to be used to follows worflows (birth found/to be searched, …) and data container quality (name normalization/convention, etc), attributes to contribute to them and why not some special user defined events we can use to join them to multiple other objects (persons, …) to store researches in them, more than in a simple note. Then we can apply some filters to follow what we have to do, to correct something or to work on our genealogy.
There is some lacks too. Filters don’t fully permit to research everything we need (i.e attributes into top part of events or medias, media filters can’t search using persons filters, etc.)
I don’t know if I need or not two databases, one to store researches, another one to publish (for the moment I’ve made the choice to have only one database and to publish everything, even researches state, hypotheses, notes…)
I’ve to use external tools to manage more efficiently my researches, so I need to include them in my workflow description so that the information that I need or that I have found passes from one tool to another (data flow)
I’m not fully organized that way but I think it is the way to go for me. I’m doing all of this description work then I apply it to my objects in Gramps.
And you, what do you think about that? What is your own organization to use Gramps? Do you have to take notes of it? Does something miss you, reports as this post began or filters or something else (like working with external tools) to make Gramps a fully genealogical researches tool?