Legacy GEDCOM Deficiencies

The following is a list of identified deficiencies in the GEDCOM 5.5 file format that need to be addressed (or explicitly NOT addressed) with GEDCOM X:

• Can't separate conclusions from evidence.
• No support for independent place entities.
• No support for multi-role event entities.
• No support for negative evidence.
• Lack of support for many of the most common data items.
  • todo: which data items specifically are needed?
• Lack of support for multimedia.
• Lack of support for formally-structured citations.
• No formal policy for managing, processing, and specifying vendor extensions.
• Requires sequential processing; the file must be processed entry-by-entry, one at a time.
• Requires inefficient processing; the entire file must be processed altogether and you can't process the file in pieces.
• Lack of reference examples and recipe books.
• Lack of shared processing code.
• Lack of validation and conformance tools.
• No support for formal data types and templates for processing text (e.g. names)
• Too narrow modeling constraints (e.g. same-gender couple relationships).
• Not enough emphasis on non-family relationships and associations.
• Fragmented vendor adoption leading to poor interoperability.
• No standard way to indicate there were no children in a marriage.
• Over-specification, overuse of rarely-used fields.
• Lack of support for referential integrity (inter-entity links are disjointed and ambiguous).
• Poor balance between inline vs. referenced data.