GEDCOM X 0.8.0 has been released.

Marriages With No Spouse

The question was raised about how to model a marriage (or divorce, etc) for which the spouse was not specified. After some discussion, it was decided that the official recommendation be to just add a marriage event to the person or persona. There were some significant drawbacks to the other options, which include creating a “relationship to nowhere” or an “empty person”.

Lang/Locale

The xml:lang attribute was added to collections, allowing collections to specify their own language. It’s probably approprate to mention here how GEDCOM X handles specifying language or locale. There isn’t much to say since GEDCOM X just refers to BCP (best current practice) 47 which is RFC 5646, which obsoletes RFC 4646, which obsoletes RFC 3066. And we’re leveraging the industry-specified attribute xml:lang to specify it in XML.

Other Changes

• We’ve done an initial take on the person summary resource
• We’ve clarified the notion of application profiles
• We’ve initialized a place to put official modeling recommendations