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.