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Genbox Terminology

The terminology for some of the features found in Genbox is explained below. Other products may have different names for equivalent features.

Charts vs. Reports

Genbox considers a genealogy "chart" output to be primarily graphical with multiple layout options and can be saved in an image format; a "report" is primarily text with fewer layout options, and can be saved in RTF format.

Vary Box Content and Styles for Individual Groups

Styles and content can be assigned according to membership in individual groups, to visually distinguish particular genealogical lines, surnames, key individuals, or any arbitrarily defined group. Styles include fonts for each type of text, box shapes (independently selected for box head and tail), shadows, fills, line styles, and colors. Content for individuals can be any combination of identifiers, attributes, events, pictures, and notes. The "individual groups" are defined as key individuals, direct lines of the key individuals, members of a predefined list of individuals, or members of the results of a query.  Content can be independently selected for primary and spouse. Extra flags and even icons can be added to further identify groups of individuals.

Source Citation Footnotes on Charts

Source citations can be included on all charts and reports. On charts, source citations appear in the Legend Box. If you have many citations on a single chart, multiple legend boxes will automatically be created.

Vary Report Content for Individual Groups

Individual content on reports can be varied according to the role the individual plays in different parts of the report: primary, preferred spouse, other spouse, child carried forward, child not carried forward. For each of these roles, the identifiers, attributes, events, event detail, contacts, contact detail, parents, general notes, research notes, and media can be separately selected.

Advanced Context Processor

For the narrative reports, an advanced context handler has the job of identifying and reducing redundancy in the output, to create a more professional text flow. While simple reductions include the use of "he" and "she" when the subject of the current sentence is the same as the last, and the use of "there" for a repeating place name, advanced reductions include the extraction of a common birth place or death place from a group of child paragraphs and placement into the leading sentence, as in: "John and Martha (Davis) Johnson had three children, all born in Petersburg, Virginia:".

Another reduction occurs when certain events occur in pairs; Genbox will create a compound sentence joining them with "and".

Another job of the context processor is ordering sentence parts by their surety levels, so that the parts with higher surety appear first. Surety levels can be automatically qualified. Suppose the selected event part order for a narrative report was "date first followed by place". Then, suppose for a given event, the surety on the date is lower than the surety on the place. Genbox will reorganize the sentence to show the place first. It will produce a sentence like "George died most likely in Handlebrook, Maine, perhaps in 1842."

Directional Event Templates 

An event like "married" is considered bidirectional; if "Joe married Jane in 1937", then it is also correct to say "Jane married Joe in 1937". An event template of the form "[P] married [S]" works well, regardless of which individual is currently considered "Primary" and which is currently considered the "Spouse". Other events between two people can be directional: "Joe proposed to Jane in 1932". Simply reversing primary and spouse in this case would not work. Instead, a sentence of the form "Jane received a marriage proposal from John in 1932" is needed. Genbox allows event templates to be directional: you can define separate event templates for the forward and reverse directions. In this case, the forward template would be "[P] proposed to [S] [D+L]", and the reverse template could be "[P] received a marriage proposal from [S] [D+L]". Then, when a narrative report is generated with either individual as the focus, the correct sentence will be generated.

Separate Source Citations on Each Data Item

Each fact, or assertion, stored in Genbox can be separately documented. For events, that means you can have a source citation on just the date, just the local site, just the place, just the reported age, etc. You can also attach a source citation to the event as a whole. Multiple sources can be cited in support for a single fact. For each source supporting a fact, the support level and credibility level can be specified. Weighing these variables, you can assign an overall surety level to the fact. Genbox even supports storing the individual name variants exactly as they appear in each source, which can be helpful later in resolving research problems. Each source citation can also have associated "lead text", annotation text, and excerpt text, for plenty of opportunities to accurately record your source citations in the most helpful way.


© Copyright 2003  Thoughtful Creations. All rights reserved. Last Updated 6/21/2003.