Re: Primary keys for companies and people

On Thursday 02 February 2006 09:05, Michael Glaesemann wrote:

>For people I'm more or less stumped. I can't think of a combination
>of things that I know I'll be able to get from people that I'll want
>to be able to add to the database. Starting off we'll have at least
>7,000 individuals in the database, and I don't think that just family
>and given names are going to be enough. I don't think we'll be able
>to get telephone numbers for all of them, and definitely aren't going
>to be getting birthdays for all.
>
>I'm very interested to hear what other use in their applications for
>holding people and companies.

I've been thinking long and hard about the same thing myself, in
developing my genealogy database. For identification of people, there
seems to be no realistic alternative to an arbitrary ID number.

Still, I'm struggling with the basic concept of /identity/, eg. is the
William Smith born to John Smith and Jane Doe in 1733, the same William
Smith who marries Mary Jones in the same parish in 1758? You may never
really know. Still, collecting such disparate "facts" under the same ID
number, thus taking the identity more or less for granted, is the modus
operandi of computer genealogy. Thus, one of the major objectives of
genealogy research, the assertion of identity, becomes totally hidden
the moment that you decide to cluster disparate evidence about what may
actually have been totally different persons, under a single ID number.

The alternative is of course to collect each cluster of evidence under a
separate ID, but then the handling of a "person" becomes a programmer's
nightmare.

I have been writing about my genealogy data model here:
<url:http://solumslekt.org/forays/blue.php> The model has been slightly
modified since I wrote this; due to what I perceive as 'gotchas' in the
PostgreSQL implementation of table inheritance, I have dropped the
'citations' table. Besides, I've dropped some of the surrogate keys,
and more will follow. I really should update this article soon.

I should perhaps be posting this under another subject, but I feel that
beneath the surface, Michael's problem and my own are strongly related.
--
Leif Biberg Kristensen | Registered Linux User #338009
http://solumslekt.org/ | Cruising with Gentoo/KDE