Is there machine readable spec for 5.5.1?

[stevespages]

I have been using the YAML files for GEDCOM 7 at https://gedcom.io/terms/v7/ and I was wondering if there is an analogous resource for version 5.5.1.

The only thing I can find for 5.5.1 is the official spec for it at https://gedcom.io/specifications/ged551.pdf. Is there anything else with this specification in a more machine readable form?

[tychonievich]

We do not currently provide such a spec as part of this project. We have discussed creating one at various times, but there are some minor technical challenges (for example, 5.5.1 had some structures with multiple payload types, which our current YAML format does not have a way of expressing) and more significant time challenges (all contributors to this project are volunteers and creating those files would take significant time and effort).

There have been some other projects to make 5.5.1 more machine-readable; #418 mentions one such project with links to the resulting files. It's not the same format as 7.0, but it has been used to generate 5.5.1 parsers.

[stevespages]

Thanks for your reply with a link to the discussion on this which I will take a closer look at soon.

In relation to your being volunteers I think I was confused because I thought familysearch.org looked to me like a company but I now see its is largely or completely voluntary and offering free services. It is a pity there is not some more money available to help you manage the specification itself.

Is the idea behind familysearch.org that users do not need to build their own gedcom file because they can submit their genealogical data to and view the results from familysearch.org?

[tychonievich]

In relation to your being volunteers I think I was confused because I thought familysearch.org looked to me like a company

FamilySearch is a company, funded by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints rather than by subscription fees or ads. They (under a previous name) developed the first version of GEDCOM and own the trademark on FamilySearch GEDCOM. They provide the domain names, legal counsel, and related administrative support for this project and also support having a few of their employees work on it for a few hours a week as part of their work responsibilities. @clarkegj is a member of the steering committee who works for FamilySearch and might be able to say more about their involvement.

Other organizations likewise provide some of their employee's time to support the project; for example, I have had some of my time on this project paid for by the University of Virginia and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

To the best of my knowledge, all of us who have employer support in working on this project (FamilySearch or otherwise) are still volunteers: we asked our employers to spend time on this project and they agreed that it was a cause worth investing some of our time to support. I have been part of the GEDCOM 7.0 project since before it had that name, and the only time I've observed a steering committee member acting as a formal representative of their company (rather than as an individual volunteer) is in the discussions about licensing, branding, and trademarks that occurred shortly before the 7.0.0 release.

The GEDCOM standard is overseen by a steering committee, currently consisting of 6 people (it has had as many as 8 and as few as 5), who meet weekly to discuss issues and pull requests on this repository. Most of the work of developing the standard is done between those meetings: we (meaning anyone interested, not just the steering committee) identify issues, propose alternatives, and write those up as pull requests on our own time. The weekly steering committee meetings primarily discuss the issues and pull requests resulting from that individual work. When the steering committee notices someone making consistent helpful contributions spanning several areas of the specification over an extended time, we invite those contributors to join the steering committee; some accept that invitation and other decline.

[stevespages]

Thanks for putting me in the picture!

[dthaler]

Discussion during GEDCOM Steering Committee:

• We discussed the fact that the GEDCOM Steering Committee is not described at https://gedcom.io/community/ and should be.
• We will take a derivative of Luther's answers above about the committee, and create a pull request to add it there to make it easier for others to find the same information.

[dthaler]

Also discussed that a PDF-to-text converter could create a text version of the 5.5.1 PDF, from which scripts could potentially be written to generate YAML files for 5.5.1.