Gnealogy

see Gedcom.NET

Gnealogy was the name of my final year project at Newcastle University. It is a genealogy application, which just like SCREEM, is designed for use with GNOME.

The original design based it heavily around CORBA and XML. It's a amazing it actually worked as it did while at university (and that wasn't very well!) as there were so many bugs. Since then I have dropped the use of CORBA, which although you may think it, was never really that much of an overhead. The biggest problem is the use of XML for querying the data. The data itself is kept in memory as an XML document, which can then be queried using an SQL like syntax, the results being returned as another XML document. Now while this was fine for small documents, for instance GEDCOM files of around 400K, it definitely does not scale to 3 megabyte GEDCOM files, primarily in listing all the individuals in a file for selection.

The XML document type used by it is GedML, a doctype devised by Michael Kay. I had thought of doing my own, but found this, and it made sense to use it rather than waste time designing a different one.

I have thought about replacing the query system with XSLT, but that still leads to the large XML results, which can be nearly as large as the original document. I may at some point change the storing of the data as XML, which would remove the scalability problem.

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Gnealogy Screenshot

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