A Robust Open-source GEDCOM Parser presented by Dallan Quass and Ryan Knight at RootsTech 2012 Parses GEDCOM files into a "de facto" object model; includes round-tripping for the vast majority of GEDCOM files.

1. A Robust Open-source GEDCOM Parser Dallan Quass [email_address] Ryan Knight [email_address]

2. What's a GEDCOM? 0 HEAD 1 SOUR PAF 2 NAME Personal Ancestral File 2 VERS 5.2.18.0 2 CORP The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 3 ADDR 50 East North Temple Street 4 CONT Salt Lake City, UT 84150 4 CONT USA 1 DEST Other 1 DATE 9 Aug 2006 2 TIME 19:57:47 1 FILE temp-paf.ged 1 GEDC 2 VERS 5.5 2 FORM LINEAGE-LINKED 1 CHAR UTF-8 1 LANG English 1 SUBM @SUB1@ 0 @SUB1@ SUBM 1 NAME Dallan Quass 0 @I1@ INDI 1 NAME Dallan /Quass/ 2 SURN Quass 2 GIVN Dallan If this looks unfamiliar to you, you may not get a lot out of this talk On the other hand, the purpose of this project is to handle this for you, so you can develop cool projects in genealogy and let this be unfamiliar to you!

3. Why is parsing GEDCOMs so hard?

4. Challenge #1 – Character set detection 0 HEAD 1 SOUR PAF 2 NAME Personal Ancestral File 2 VERS 5.2.18.0 2 CORP The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 3 ADDR 50 East North Temple Street 4 CONT Salt Lake City, UT 84150 4 CONT USA 1 DEST Other 1 DATE 9 Aug 2006 2 TIME 19:57:47 1 FILE temp-paf.ged 1 GEDC 2 VERS 5.5 2 FORM LINEAGE-LINKED 1 CHAR UTF-8 1 LANG English 1 SUBM @SUB1@ 0 @SUB1@ SUBM 1 NAME Dallan Quass 0 @I1@ INDI 1 NAME Dallan /Quass/ 2 SURN Quass 2 GIVN Dallan Should be easy, except...

6. Challenge #1 – Character set detection ANSEL

7. Challenge #2 – Custom tags The GEDCOM specification hasn't been updated in a LONG time

8. Challenge #3 – Misused tags

9. Shout out Tim Forsythe VGed - GEDCOM validator http://ancestorsnow.blogspot.com/ 2011/07/vged.html

10. ALIA 1 SEX M 1 ALIA /Ted/ 1 BIRT

11. SOUR 0 @N6@ NOTE 1 CONT adopted surname Termaat 2 SOUR @S9@

12. DATA 2 SOUR @S2149874917@ 3 DATA 4 DATE 11 Sep 1924 3 NOTE ... 3 DATA 4 TEXT ... 2 SOUR @S99@ 3 DATA 4 TEXT William Donald ... 4 DATE 1 Sep 1997 2 SOUR @S28@ 3 PAGE Indian Prarie... 3 QUAY 3 3 DATE 28 Feb 2005

13. Challenge #4 – Unused tags Event Phone Event Agency Source Citation Event Type

14. Challenge #5 – Names

15. GEDCOM Standard ? The code is more what you'd call " guidelines " than actual rules .

16. Two goals

17. Goal #1 – Parse GEDCOMs into a de facto object model De Facto: In fact or in practice; in actual use or existence, regardless of official or legal status. – Wictionary.org Model should be straightforward, easy to use and understand

18. Goal #2 – Round-trip From GEDCOM To Object Model Back to GEDCOM without information loss

19. Nirvana

20. There is no Nirvana

21. But we can get pretty close 94%

22. How is it done? ???

23. Object model

24. People

25. Extensions

28. GEDCOM Export Visitor pattern 600 LoC

29. JSON GEDCOM POJO JSON POJO GEDCOM Simple model persistence using Google GSON

30. Further thoughts

31. Do we need a radically-different data-exchange model for genealogy?

32. I don't know A new proposed object model could use this project to migrate existing GEDCOMs to the de facto model, then translate the de facto model objects to the new model

33. Do we need GEDCOM validation tools?

34. Definitely! A list of “standard” custom tags would also be pretty helpful

35. We live in the real world

36. Purpose of this project

38. Demonstration of Gedcom Server

39. Demonstration of Gedcom Server