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Alternative profiles

Job Waterreus

July 08, 2011 20:24

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Sometimes different sources mention different facts about the same person and sometimes these "facts" are incompatible. I would to the ability to create a profile for each source and then link these profiles with a new link type "is alternative".

Example 1:If one source has different parents for a person then the other source, you create a profile for each and link the profiles as  "is alternative". When there is prove an alternative is wrong, you should be able to mark it as wrong and add some proof of why it is wrong (just deleting could mean somebody will add it again, but it should be possible)

Example 2: Names in different languages. You could make alternative profiles for different languages. This will make it easier to find the profile.

13 comments

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  Drs Jacobus Frederik Theodorus Bergman July 10, 2011 08:33

  Re:You could make alternative profiles for different languages

   

  Doing this was the end of the search possibilities and match possibilities of Rodovid.org. There is nothing more bad for the development of a site than having alternative profiles in different languages. Also familypedia did get problems by doing so. Synchronizing seems to be impossible !

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  Job Waterreus July 10, 2011 20:29

  Yes, I can see that is a problem.

  I think the Geni solution also is not optimal, so what then?

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  Harald Tveit Alvestrand (Tveit) July 11, 2011 06:55

  I think one person = one profile is important.

  Much better would be support for alternate theories within a profile - if there are two possible fathers, I want to be able to list both, with references linked to each theory.

  Multilingual data is *real hard*.

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  James D Roberts July 11, 2011 16:25

  I believe that there should only be one profile for each person, not two or more.

  To show alternates, or various alternate data should not be a separate profile. However, the ability to search for and match to the alternate could prove to be very useful and beneficial.  

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  Job Waterreus July 11, 2011 19:37

  Would different relationships for one profile not be very hard to put in a tree view? What should be shown in tree view when there are alternatives for relations?

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  Lauri Kreen August 10, 2011 07:15

  Use the field "About Me/Him/Her" for pointing out all such alternative values etc.

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  Job Waterreus August 10, 2011 07:25

  Lauri,

   

  Will that work for searching?

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  Drs Jacobus Frederik Theodorus Bergman August 10, 2011 07:33

  Lauri, definitively not ! As I wrote in the first comment: Familipedia and Rodovid stuck on the languagedifferences, searching for dupliocates isn't possible in an automatic way, everybody must then do the search on trial base !

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  Drs Jacobus Frederik Theodorus Bergman August 10, 2011 07:35

  Sorry Lauri, I meant Job

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  Job Waterreus August 10, 2011 11:03

  Fred,

   

  I did not mean automatic duplicate detection.

  I'm just wondering if I put alternatives / different languages in the about part of the profile, would it then possible to find the profile by searching?

  If not  then what? Some people have different names in a large number of languages, It is not practical to put them all in name fields.If it is not possible to find a profile then there is a big change that there will be multiple profiles for the same person. Merging them will be difficult - where do you put the name information?

  If alternative profiles are not a solution, then what?

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  Lauri Kreen August 10, 2011 17:14

  Probably Geni shall in future add About Me to searhable items or to modify Also Known As field to be much longer than current limit,

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  Job Waterreus August 10, 2011 21:36

  Lauri,

   

  That would help.

  Would that also take into account spelling variations like Co(o)len meaning Colen or Coolen

  It would be nice if the search would be smarter. In Dutch the ij and y sound the same, and people use sometimes one form and sometimes the other. This will vary with the language.This is only one example of differences in spelling for Dutch, there are many more. Google is smart enough to know about this kind of variation. Would something like that also be possible for Geni search?

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  Dan Cornett August 10, 2011 23:22

  I agree that 1 profile = 1 person.  Perhaps a solution would be to have Geni.com link a Google search appliance into their system ... to help with finding language variations across all (text?) fields.