GedXL
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Category: General
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Published on Saturday, 27 September 2008 21:51
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Written by Ove
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I was serching for some news about the future of genealogical data and found the following article at http://www.genealogy.com/37_gary.html Author is Gary Hoffman.
GedXL
Several developers have been working with the new Extensible Markup Language being proposed for exchanging of structured information over the Internet. XML, as it is known, is a format for data exchange that is related to HTML, the hyper text markup language of the World Wide Web. Both are subsets of the SGML format that was developed for the publishing industry. XML is being developed to overcome the limitations of HTML and allow the Web to be used for electronic commerce, access to databases, and for many other computing and communication tasks.
Web browsers that can handle XML are not yet available, although Microsoft's Internet Explorer in version 4.0 already has some XML capabilities built in. Specialized versions of XML are rapidly being developed for various disciplines. For example, Microsoft has promised that Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, in their next versions, will save their files in an XML format for easy exchange over the web. Chemists, pharmacists, auto dealers, librarians, and experts in many other fields are developing XML "data type definitions" for their fields.
GedML, genealogical data in XML, was announced on April 15, 1998, by Michael H. Kay, a computer scientist in England. Kay's GedML uses the information data model of GEDCOM 5.5 to express genealogical information in XML browsable format. Kay published GedML at URL http://users.iclway.co.uk/mhkay/gedml/index.html and is seeking comments on his proposal. Kay sees an XML version of GEDCOM as a way of using industry standard techniques to solve the problems of GEDCOM compatibilities. He cited a number of benefits, including intelligent indexing of genealogical data by web-based search engines which can distinguish, for example, between Ireland as a country and Ireland as a surname. Instead of searching for sites that merely mention Ireland, you will be able to search for sites containing genealogical data referring to the surname Ireland.
While very little note has been taken of GedML since its introduction, it has the potential of completely eliminating the need for GEDCOM as we know it and particular the need for any future direction of GEDCOM.
