After over two years of collaboration and active development, we’re excited to announce the first stable milestone release of the core GEDCOM X specification set.

Next Phase, New Rules

The purpose of the milestone release is to stabilze the specification set so we can move to the next phase of development. The focus of the next phase will be specifically on documentation and developer tools. This includes “non-normative” tutorials, use cases, and recipes as well as the development of open-source libraries for the most popular platforms.

There might also be some edits to the specifications, but any changes from this point will be backwards-compatible changes. These kinds of changes include any textual errors or clarifications, but we are also open to adding any new properties that we might have missed, as long as the improvements don’t require any semantic or syntactic adjustments.

The point is: any new contributions to the project, whether it be in the form of open-source libraries or reference documentation, can be provided with a reasonable degree of confidence that they won’t soon become outdated. It’s really hard to implement a moving target.

Everyone’s Invited

As we open up this new phase of development, we’d love to have you involved. We’ve just opened up a new GEDCOM X Users and Developers Forum that you’re welcome to use. Or you’re welcome to use the Github Issue Forum to submit any issues or feature requests.