I think it’d be interesting to have a place qualifier place quality option similar to the date quality in the event editor. I’m thinking about options like “Certain” (=default) and “Uncertain”.
I often have the problem that I don’t know the exact place of an event e.g. are they born at home or at a neighbours house or in the next hospital or e.g. did they married at their home parish or somewhere else. That uncertainty can be because I haven’t found a record yet or because the pace isn’t mentioned in the record.
In both cases I’d like to record a place if I have a reasonable suspicion, but mark it as uncertain, so I don’t get confused with other place data.
I do know that there are already ways in gramps to record a uncertainty about a place (event description field, notes, tags, etc).
My goal is to make it more visible in event and person editors as well as in the list and tree views, so you can distinguish between a place mentioned in a source or one not mentioned.
To do that it’d be great to have an easy way to mark it in the event reference editor, so I suggested the options “certain” and “uncertain” similar to the date quality “regular”, “estimated” and “calculated”.
Isn’t the source confidence uncertain rather than the place in those cases?
When I think of an uncertain place, my uncertainty normally means ambiguity about the place itself rather than the event. (Say that I don’t know if they’re referring to the city or county that both bear the same name. Or the same name is used for multiple places within a reasonable distance. Or the geopolitical boundaries changed over time and I am uncertain if the source meant within the boundaries of the Event occurrence or those of the time the Source was written.)
Normally, I put the high confidence enclosing space in for the Place. Any uncertainty within that enclosing space can be noted in the description text or as a ToDo type note
No, a source does not get less valid, because it doesn’t mention the place. The confidence is more a valuation of how much you trust a source. For place and date it is either mentioned or not.
That is also my way of doing it right now, but I’m not satisfied with it:
First, I already put too many things into the description field, because I often enter many people at once and it’s the faster way.
Second, the event editor, event list view, person list view do not show the difference between certain and uncertain places if you record that information as a note or in the description field. The information that a date is estimated or calculated is shown.
It isn’t likely that those changes will address this concern. But it might have had to done something we could stretch. (The Address tab was inadequate for some purposes and was needed for Events as well as People.)
Maybe we’ll eventually be able to put in Keyhole Markup Language (KML) overlays to associate with Events. That would allow indicating such a scope of uncertainty.
I know that I’d like to be able to put in more definition for interments without adding excessive branching into the Place Hierarchy. (Which is SOMEWHAT what the Addresses do for People.)
The thought that we might be able to include section, plot, grave number & GPS coordinates is intriguing. It would be nice to be able to output cemetery map with graves plotted & summarized. (That might eventually support metadata import/export on images. You visit a cemetery, take loads of monument snapshots. Drop them into Gramps to crate a preview Gramplet of unfiled thumbnails. filter the Events in a cemetery & drop each photo on top of specific burials. This attaches the photo to the burial, renamed & files the media snapshot, imports the GPS coordinates & provenance from the metadata, updates the metadata with the Individual’s name & birth-death.)
As I see it, what you are describing is adding a Confidence level to an event absent a source/citation. A place record is a location that you have identified. It is a fact. What you are questioning is “is this the correct or ideal place record for this event?”. There is no problem with the place record. You are questioning “are the components of the event correct?”. Ultimately, you are questioning the event.
Others may see this as a case for an “alternative” event record, something I am not a fan of. I treat any event without a source/citation as suspect and subject to change. But what I have entered is the best information I have at this time.
When I first read the “Place qualifier” header I thought the discussion would be adding something like “Near” to the event place record.
Why can you not do this now? Any scenario you describe would need to add hierarchies below the Cemetery record. Section, Row, Plot. The problem would be how does the individual cemetery organize their layout. And then you could/would add the lat/log for an individual plot.
The Section, Row, Plot information could be put into the hierarchy. It could also be put in as single entry under the Cemetery. Consistency, as always, being the key.
I’m very sorry if my comment caused any offense to anyone. I certainly did not intend any. All I meant was, there must be some reasons for any hypothesis, and those reasons can be documented in sources (even if the sources are just written memories), and the sources can be cited.
I aready record Disproven items… so that it isn’t necessary to re-run the disproving exercise the next time the same bad info pops up. (As an example, I often see the Christening information that was mistaken for Birth data. Such a widely held misimpression can often be traced back to single Source being transcribed incorrectly.)
So marking other data as low-probability ‘theory’ would also be good if Gramps is to be a research tool rather than simple filing system. But it also it raises the spectre of data transfer problems. If the receiving system CANNOT annotate something as theoretical or Disproven, all of the transferred data becomes ‘fact’ instead ‘fiction’.
Actually, that’s not true. Just as the Addresses are like Attributes but are more than simple label:value binary Tuples… they are structured n-tuples. (I think!) These single-use Address definitions don’t need to clutter the Places Hierarchy.
Likewise, structured n-tuples designed to hold burial plot info wouldn’t clutter the Hierarchy with a flood of single use places. (Graves addresses would be incompatible with any of the GIS lookup tools. That’s important because my 2,600 record Place Hierarchy is already unbearably slow everytime I add an Event and have to re-populate the Select Place dialog. I cannot imagine what would happen if another 6,800 Places were added to cover all the Burial plots in the Tree.)
I’m sorry if I caused confusion, but for more clarification:
I do know that there are already ways in gramps to record a uncertainty about a place (event description field, notes, tags, etc).
My goal is to make it more visible in event and person editors as well as in the list and tree views, so you can distinguish between a place mentioned in a source or one not mentioned.
To do that it’d be great to have an easy way to mark it in the event reference editor, so I suggested the options “certain” and “uncertain” similar to the date quality “regular”, “estimated” and “calculated”.
You could use addresses and store the section, plot, and grave numbers in the Street field. Since addresses can have date spans, this would be especially appropriate for situations where a person’s remains were transferred at some point.
There is already a feature request to add coordinates to addresses. But meanwhile, you could get a map from the cemetery office and georeference it. That would be a good thing to do before you visit the cemetery to take all of those photos!
To do this would you need to make each place link to the event a PlaceReference where the qualifier gets added much like when a place is added to another place’s enclosed by tab stopping and asking to enter the date information.
Or some type of selector in the event record to alert the user something may not be quite right.
If the Event record had a qualifier/quality indicator, could the event record in a list be marked in some way. Printed in italic if the standard was something less than Certain, as an example.
Yes, our discussions in the other thread already had me thinking that way. I’ve already acquired cemetery layout diagrams from several of my family’s most heavily populated (?) graveyards. And then overlaid those in a map tiling tool. Now I just have to get a KML overlay of the known GPS data (from BillionGraves) to go with the Burial Events list of each cemetery.