STEMMA V2.2

Just a brief note for anyone who might be keeping an eye on the development of STEMMA®: V2.2 of the specification was finally published yesterday.

It always takes a while to update the Web site as the main documents are in Microsoft Word format, and heavily linked using cross-references and bookmarks. Converting these into equivalent linked HTML pages is painstaking.

This release contains the following main changes:

• Person – The Birth and Death Events have been restructured to allow local Eventlets as well as full Event entities.
• Group – Now revised as discussed in Revisiting the Family Group. They can now represent real-world group entities such as organisations, regiments, classes, clubs, etc. They also support alternative names, events, sources, hierarchies, attachments, and Properties in the same way as Places and Persons.
• Place and Group – Now have elements analogous to a Person’s Birth and Death elements, called Creation and Demise. In the case of a Place, this supersedes the previous Void element.
• Place and Group – Now accommodate non-hierarchical relationships to related entities, as discussed in Related Entities.
• Resource – Now distinguishes physical artefacts (e.g. photographs) from images thereof. The range of predefined physical artefacts has been extended.
• Resource – Uses MIME data-types for improved representation of digital media.
• Resource – Control over sensitivity now possible for photographs, documents, etc.
• Header – Persisted Counters in Dataset header for assisted key generation.
• General – Person, Place, Group, and Event entities can now be given IDs applicable to arbitrary external systems (e.g. databases, online resources). This allows STEMMA to link into those external systems.