In an effort to build up the available documentation of GEDCOM X, I’m going to take a little bit of time each week to write about how GEDCOM X can be used to represent genealogical data. I must admit, the amount of needed documentation is a bit overwhelming. But since I have to start somewhere, I’m just going to choose an aspect of the genealogical research process to write about each week, based on my own whims. I’d love to get input from the community to help influence which concepts to cover in what order. My hope is that over time, developers who are interested in using GEDCOM X will have a good set of documentation available as a reference.

Here are some of the concepts that I’m thinking about covering. They are arbitrarily grouped and arbitrarily ordered.

• Birth-Like Information
• Death-Like Information
• Marriage-Like Information
• Names
• Other Miscellaneous Facts and Events
• Identity (i.e. “Same Person”) Claims
• Relationships
• Media (Photos, Stories, etc.)
• Transcriptions, Translations, and Abstracts
• Sources, Records, and Collections
• Places
• Analysis Documents/Proof Statements
• Attribution and Confidence
• Notes
• Identifiers

Hopefully that set will provide a good start.

Feedback is welcome. We’re listening on a number of different channels, including comments on the blog, the GEDCOM X user list, and the Github issue tracker.