Towards a history of almost anything
SUMMARY - APPLICATION GOALS:
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Build a modular, extendable application which manages the recording, analysis and reporting of research in any discipline associated with the history of any type of object
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Build an application complying with the GPL open source environment
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Build an application that will run on Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems with a single code base
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Use Java as the main implementation language
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Allow all text to be stored and manipulated as UTF-8 Unicode
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Enable the application to be extensible by the use of plug-ins that comply with the architecture and use the required registration and application interfaces
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The use of suitable GPL components is to be favored over the implementation of home-grown modules
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Application modules should be decoupled and testable within a suitable test framework
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The application will be able to be used in 2 modes:
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All components in a standalone installation, or
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A user interface running on a client computer with services being provided by an external server, not necessarily being cloud-based. NOTE: in this configuration there may be concurrent users of the database.
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PROJECT BACKGROUND
The recording and analysis of historical records is a diverse subject, with the most common example being family history. However, there are two major issues with current family history applications and their position within the historical research landscape.
Firstly, they are constrained by their focus on the parenting of children and birth, death and marriage events. This family-centric focus imposes constraints on the types of data that can be recorded for later analysis and the types of inter-entity relationships that can be recorded. For instance, it is very difficult to present descriptions of the social family, with adoption, children by other partners, etc, and to represent a household versus a biological family. Many anthropological studies require a far wider definition of 'family'.
Secondly, most current family history applications are intentionally designed to focus on recording the history of individuals and their genetic relationships to other individuals. Such applications are not designed, for example, to record the history of an organisation as it went through structural re-organisation, takeovers, mergers, splits, CEO replacements, and so on. Some family history applications may allow creative customizations which can approximate recording such history, but this is unusual. Since their market is typically aimed at the casual family genealogist, these limitations are an inherent consequence of their goal to make the product simple and easy to use by that market for that one specific purpose. Such design limitations usually exclude more sophisticated features and tools desired by the more limited market of serious or professional family history researchers.
However, a more generic and sophisticated application could not only serve serious family history researchers, but could also extend its market to serious and professional researchers in many other fields of historical research.
Examples of such fields of research include the history of:
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organisations, companies, political parties, associations, military units, trade unions, etc
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medical conditions of communities, extended families, etc
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conflicts (at any level), such as wars, social change, etc
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anthropological groups (management of paternal/maternal kin-term distinctions, multiple naming streams, associated ‘significant others’, etc)
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land, buildings, vessels, vehicles, etc (for owners, builders, architects, tenants, etc)
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animal lineage, as in the breeding of dogs, cats, horses, whatever
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botanical lineage, as in plant breeding
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geographical regions, towns, villages, precincts, etc
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investigations and research (as in police work, experimental science, etc)
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art works - sculpture, music, film, radio, TV, drama, paintings, books (for artists, scripts, writers, players, producers, editors, restorers, etc)
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legal cases and the characters/roles in them or affected by them
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sporting competitions and events
All of these examples have similar underlying data storage and generic inter-relationship requirements, with the common elements being:
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a historical timeline of events
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recording of evidence about these events
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recording relationships of entities to those events and to other entities
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analysis of the evidence to reach conclusions
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preparation of reports, which may be research-field dependent, like the specialised relationship diagrams used in anthropology
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documentation through the inclusion of documents, images, recordings, etc.
Thus the goal of the HRE project is the creation of a sophisticated application capable of supporting serious general historical research, rather than a simple application limited solely to the requirements of recording basic family history.
CHOICE OF DATABASE:
There are 3 classes of database use that need to be recognized: embedded single user, embeddable but multi-concurrent users and standalone TCP/IP networked. It is recognised that a single user database like SQLite would need too much extra code as a wrapper to allow for multi-concurrent users.
Although there are at least 3 other options, H2 (http://www.h2database.com/html/main.html) seems to be the most efficient available option.
DATABASE GOALS:
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The SQL database engine must be GPL (current choice being H2)
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There must be a database abstraction interface to allow replacement of the database engine if required in the future
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There will be a limit on the number of concurrent users of a single database (say 10)
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There will a limit on the number of records in any database table (say 10M)
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Every record of every user data table shall have a persistent record ID.
USER INTERFACE:
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The presentation layer (user GUI and Report Generation) shall be able to operate in any supported natural language
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Language selection may be changed during application execution
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The user interface must be configurable to provide:
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Choice of content and layout with persistence of settings
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Choice of accessibility for vision, color and motor-skills available
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Choice of language
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Efficient pathways for common user workflows
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Balance of the use of screen real estate to achieve clarity of data presented
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Standard idioms of look and feel as used in browsers and in complex word processing and diagram drawing packages.
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All operations that may take a long time to complete must give status progress back to the user.
DATA MANAGEMENT:
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User files must be operating system independent in content
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The application must have facilities to import digital records in known discipline-related formats
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The application must have facilities to export digital records to known discipline-related formats
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All user data must have the capability to store alternative forms in any supported language
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The user must have the ability to “undo” at least the last data modifying command
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On a per session-basis, the user must be able identify what data has been changed, from what to what and by whom since the start of the session
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Selection and ordering of the focus of data manipulation:
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Manual selection and automated selection by use of filters must be provided
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Custom filters must be able to be saved and re-used.
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The report generator will:
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Provide default standard reports
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Permit users to create their own report templates
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Permit output to a number of word processing and other formats
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Permit creation of documents using larger page sizes (up to A0).
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All data management operations that may take a long time to complete must provide status progress back to the user.
INTEROPERABILITY:
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To be able to export any data within the HRE database to XML format
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To provide functionality within the initial implementation that allows for the creation of plugin code to extend the functionality of HRE
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To provide plug-ins for genealogists to:
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Import project files created by The Master Genealogist v8.05 (and later) without loss of information and loss of an ability to use that data as it was in TMG
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Import GEDCOM v7 format files
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Export data from HRE that conforms to the GEDCOM v7 specifications
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Import data from other genealogical programs by use of the plug-in concept.
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As this part is a complex document in its own right, refer to ‘1.6 Implementation Stages’ in the /Specifications folder.
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