FamilySearch/gedcomx — Issue #135: Do Notes really need to be GenealogicalResources?
Author: EssyGreen
Created: 2012-02-09 17:10:04+00:00
State: open

One of the problems I found with the old GEDCOM model was the vaguary yet complexity of the Notes ... ie there was no indication what the NOTE might be used for, whether it was a description, a research note, public or private etc etc 99% of the time it is used as pure text ... yet as a developer it had to be treated as a full blown record to allow for the fact that there *might* just be citations or REFNs or a RIN or whatever. GEDCOM 5.5.1.5 gave me some hope by deprecating citations against embedded NOTEs and thereby allowing simple text but GEDCOMX seems to have reverted to a complex heavy-weight object again. Whilst I appreciate that this makes for simpler modelling I think it's a cop-out and will add unnecessary complexity ... How many users will enter an attribution for every note they write? (Or every Field they enter come to that - since the humble Field also inherits from the GenealogicalResource!)

It seems that the model is trying to take inheritance to the Nth degree but in doing so you lose meaning and context ... Ultimately virtually any data could inherit from an array of strings but it doesn't make it very useful.