Gramps excels at handling genealogical data from many cultures in many languages, but there’s always room for improvement. To move forward and test in a more structured manner, we need more diverse yet deep focused testing and tutorial material.
So, how about a collaborative effort to extend the cultural practices diversity demonstrated in the sample data?
I suggest using national leader (maybe the founding fathers, their spouses and parents?) family trees as a practical testing ground. With familiar public persons, there is broader range of reference material to use as real-world data. And people importing the data will find the test data familiar enough to find problems.
This project explores how to store challenging genealogical data like:
Complex naming conventions
Managing multiple calendar systems
Integrating culture-specific historical sources
These goals need volunteers with good knowledge of their cultural genealogical practices. Your expertise can help refine how Gramps handles data specific to your heritage, benefiting researchers worldwide who face similar challenges.
Gramps is a community-driven initiative. As an open-source Python project, volunteer sometimes believe that only programmers can contribute non-monetarily. But improving sample data is one of the many ways that a non-programmer can have an impact. Your contributions, whether large or small, can significantly impact Gramps’ ability to preserve and represent diverse family histories accurately for your culture.
With this project, you can start small and grow the local tree. You need not wait until the tree is complete. (We all know that genealogical research can never be “complete” nor feels “ready” to be shared. )
So, if you’re interested in improving how Gramps supports your culture’s genealogical nuances, please consider contributing.
The first part would probably be someone volunteer to coordinate collaboration on specific countries and log where working together works and does not.
The Isotammi team (Jorma Haapasalo, Juha Mäkeläinen @jpek-m , Kari Kujansuu @kku , Pekka Valta @PeterPower, and Timo Nallikari @TimNal) already has experience with having lots of people working on pieces of a genealogy problem. Perhaps they could advise us?
Or maybe a country could be selected and the Gramps-project could fund an account on @DavidMStraub 's GrampsHub to experiment with collaborating there?
fair enough
I think a good way to break this down would be to list out the different ways of alternates to a default.
I guess this would be a breakdown by alphabets for example. Non Latin alphabets being the most obvious, but also different accents and similar.
As to royal92.ged, speaking from experience of using it, although it does have a variety of date qualifiers, on the whole it is quite poor for actual variety for alphabets and complex name forms, as pretty much all entries (from what I remember) are written in english, and follow a pattern of First_Name Last_Name Title
e.g. Henry V Lancaster, King of England
Can’t speak to the US Presidents.ged, but I would imagine it might be similar
I agree. They wouldn’t stretch Gramps at all. I mostly mentioned them so that they are not suggested as baselines. Those bases are already covered well enough. Not sense covering it again.
My personal project is intending to be all embracing, in the sense of a variety of alphabets and date types, and most of my experimentation has seen gramps handle the varying forms very well. A particular standout e.g. (that I have only seen successfully handled on one other family tree software that I, as a windows user, can access) has been format controls for Hieroglyphs, which Gramps has performed as desired on. I basically have found that, in near all cases, if the user has the font for to it to work, Gramps handles it very well (it does struggle a bit with ligatures, but this is relatively minor)
The only two areas I have seen it drop somewhat more significantly is the two bugs that I have prior raised, namely not strong handling of date ranges in the BCE era, and no way to change direction of text when writing mixed text direction notes/names.
As for handling of names, I think that simply requires the user to be careful and know their way around the name formatting tools, which I have found to be very strong and useful (although, as I have mentioned to you in the past, would be nice for the date spans to actually count for something to data displayed in the software, not simply in reports).
For multiple calendar systems, I think that it would be welcome if Gramps could potentially expand even further with their options (although I will say that the existing amount is the second highest number I have seen of any software, and the only exceeding software I don’t fully know their base systems at times).
Finally, I will admit that I can not speak too much for culture specific historical sources, but being able to have a more refined citation tool, as I believe has been requested a few times, would go a big step I feel to helping that on that front.
Showing handling of Hieroglyph Format Controls, Coptic and Greek Font handling (non windows standard fonts (New Athena Unicode and Aegean respectively)
Complex handling of place names (these date ranges do break on reimport, per raised bug, although not the font elements (requiring a fix to the ranges upon a re-import, for valid display/usage for individuals. Any date ranges used by individuals for their events, using from and to, or names, also break)
Present in this list is: Ancient Egyptian, Elamite, Akkadian, Assyrian, Mycenean/Linear B, Ugaritic, Aramaic, Phoenician, Hebrew, Merotitic, Old Persian, Greek, Palmyrene, Middle Persian, East and West Syriac, Coptic and Arabic
