GEPS 006: Better Place handling
Changes already implemented
A new hierarchical place view was introduced in version 3.2 of Gramps.
The place object was left unchanged, but the existing location fields were interpreted as a hierarchy. The location fields are as follows:
- Country
- State
- County
- City
- Street
The new view displays Country, State and County as a tree.
Proposed changes
Integration with online map tools
Which online map tools? - NH
Good definition of place and address/residence event in Gramps
- For UK data, an extra Locality field between City and Street would be useful.
- For Dutch data, an extra Municipality field between County and City would be useful. (Feature Request 4231)
We could re-define each field for each country, or we could try to keep each field maintaining similar data. I think that I prefer adding a couple of extra fields.
Existing | USA | UK | France | Netherlands |
---|---|---|---|---|
State | State | Not Used | Region | State |
County | County | County | Department | Province |
New field 1 | Not Used | Not Used | Not Used | Municipality |
City | City | City | City | City |
New field 2 | Not Used | Locality | Not Used | Not Used |
Street | Street | Street | Street | Street |
We would need a country table. This would hold the field definitions for each country including the field names, 'not used' flags, and which fields should be used in the place tree view.
This data could then be used to dynamically create fields in the place editor, place filter and place tree view.
Define one ideal way of working with alternative place
Physical places can have more than one name and can move between administrative regions over time. The following list gives examples of why places need alternate names:
- Places can change their name over time.
- In countries where more than one language is spoken the place may have different names in different languages.
- Multiple names for a place may exist where there are variant spellings for the place name.
- Different names may be used for political reasons.
For genealogical purposes it is important to record the place name as it appears in the source material. We could define alternative places with a date span. There may be one or more alternative places within a given date span.
Improve the place tree view
At present the place tree uses a three level hierarchy of Country, State and County.
For some countries the State field is not relevant - for example in the UK. In this case it is more useful to display a Country and County or Country, County and City hierarchy.
Countries also use different descriptions for the their administrative regions. We could change the column headings according to the country displayed. This would require a countries table in the database. We could also restrict the view to displaying only one country at a time.
Improve data entry in the Place editor
We could use drop-down lists in the place editor to allow the user to select values for each of the hierarchical fields. The data could come from data already in the database or we could consider building up a gazetteer for Gramps.
The place editor could be made clearer if the hierarchical fields were placed together in the editor window.
Motivation
Time and again users pose questions on improving the place structure of Gramps. This GEPS is about defining a new improved way of handling place, keeping backward compatibility with GEDCOM/present Gramps.
Many things are also not well designed, in that Gramps allows the user to do as he likes, without guiding the user to a good way of storing place data. (this statement is disputed, see discussion)
Some ideas
- Geonames
- Gedcom 5.5EL
- An internal place database
References
Some relevant bug tracker entries: