Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Open Source Community Source Templates

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Dovy Paukstys, Chief Technical Officer at Real-Time Collaboration, Inc., passed along this press release about the SourceTemplates Model:

Real-Time Collaboration And Legacy Family Tree Announce the Donation of AncestorSync™ SourceTemplates Model and Legacy’s Source Templates to the Open Source Community.

Legacy Family Tree is donating 1,400 SourceTemplates to complement the AncestorSync SourceTemplates Model
Orem, Utah (Real-Time Collaboration) Oct. 5, 2011- Real-Time Collaboration and Legacy Family Tree have announced the addition of thousands of SourceTemplates and a SourceTemplate model to help standardize the tracking of source materials.   This addition of SourceTemplates and the SourceTemplate model have culminated in a comprehensive resource available for the genealogy community. 

Real-Time Collaboration, Inc’s AncestorSync™ Division recognizes the following companies whose original work and generous contributions allowed AncestorSync™ to aggregate their efforts into this model:  Ancestral Quest, Family Tree Maker, Legacy Family Tree, MacFamily Tree, Personal Ancestral File (PAF), and Roots Magic. 

The AncestorSync™ Division is also working with Better GEDCOM to create additional templates to better serve the global community.

BetterGEDCOM issued this statement, “BetterGEDCOM is an independent group of end users and software developers working toward the next generation of open standards for communicating genealogy information electronically.  We also welcome SourceTemplates.org (http://sourcetemplates.org/) to the effort to develop a widely supported international model for source citations.”

About Real-Time Collaboration, Inc.
Real-Time Collaboration, a genealogy process automation company, melds social networking capabilities with state-of-the-art family history and genealogy technologies to connect individuals around the world who share common ancestors. Real-Time Collaboration is based in Orem, Utah.

For more information about AncestorSync™, contact us at info@ancestorsync.com or 1.877.436.3256 or visit our website at www.ancestorsync.com.

About Legacy Family Tree
Founded in 1984, Millennia Corporation publishes the award-winning Legacy Family Tree genealogy software program, with headquarters in Surprise, Arizona. More information can be found at www.LegacyFamilyTree.com.

My commentary:
 Currently, if a user creates a source citation using a source template in one of the software programs, and tries to use GEDCOM to import their genealogy data file into another program, or to an online tree, the source citations sometimes get mangled. Free-form source citations (which use a limited number of fields) do better than source citations created by the Evidence! Explained source templates because each program uses a different set of GEDCOM tags.
I think that this is fantastic.  What I think it means is that:
*  A user can create their own source citations from scratch using the source templates provided by Legacy Family Tree.
*  A user with source citations created by one of the participating software programs can be transferred to an online tree or to another software program using the AncestorSync program without getting mangled. 

2 comments:

J. Paul Hawthorne said...

Thanks for this important info. I use FTM and recently added Legacy and plan to add more along with online trees like Genie. J.Paul

Karl said...

Great news indeed! Dare we hope that this is finally the beginning of the end of the long outdated GEDCOM?