The Gedcom Parser project initially began as a semester-long team project for SWW555: Agile Methods of Development at Stevens Institute of Technology. We worked to build out a scalable infrastructure to parse and organize GEDCOM files (a standard format for genealogy data) Team members lean on these fundamentals to build additional features while appling Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrum methods. We conducted weekly sprints with prioritized user stories that would be added to parser systems.
GEDCOM is a standard format for genealogy data developed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. GEDCOM identifies two major entities: individuals and families. GEDCOM allows you to describe the following characteristics of individuals:
- Unique individual ID
- Name
- Sex/Gender
- Birth date
- Death date
- Unique Family ID where the individual is a child
- Unique Family ID where the individual is a spouse
Likewise, GEDCOM allows you to describe the following characteristics of a family:
- Unique family ID•Unique individual ID of husband
- Unique individual ID of wife
- Unique individual ID of each child in the family
- Marriage date
- Divorce date, if appropriate
GEDCOM is a line-oriented text file format where each line has three parts separated by a blank space:
- level number (0, 1, or 2)
- tag (a string of 3 or 4 characters)
- arguments (an optional character string)
All lines (or records) begin with a level number that is used to group the information from multiple records. Records with level numbers 1 and 2 are always in the form:
<level_number>
Lines with level number 0 have one of two different forms. The first has the form
0
where is INDI or FAM. The field between the "0" and the tag is a unique identifier used to identify an individual or a family.
The second version of level 0 records has the form
0
where is HEAD, TRLR, or NOTE.
For example,
0 p1 INDI
begins the definition of a new person with id ‘p1’. The definition may include any number of records of level 1 or 2. The definition of person ‘p1’ ends either at the end of the GEDCOM file, or with the next level 0 record.
0 f207 FAM
begins the definition of a new family with id ‘f207’.
0 NOTE this is comment
defines a new comment.
Level numbers provide a mechanism for grouping records in hierarchical groups: all records with larger level numbers than the current record belong to the entity headed by that entity. For example, all of the records from the first level 0 record, up to, but not including the “0 F32 FAM” record, belong to the group headed by the first record (with level 0) that describes the individual with ID “I27”. The DATE record with level number 2 is associated with the previous BIRT record with level number 1.
0 I27 INDI
1 NAME Mark /Ardis/
1 SEX M
1 BIRT
2 DATE 7 APR 1949
1 FAMC F32
0 NOTE end of individual Mark Ardis
The first level 0 record identifies a new individual with id “I27”. All following records with level greater than 0, until the next level 0 record, identify characteristics of individual I27. The “1 NAME” record specifies that the name of individual I27 is ‘Mark Ardis’. (The individual’s last name is surrounded by slashes.) The ‘1 SEX M’ record specifies that the gender of individual I27 is male. The ‘1 BIRT’ record is the first of two records that specify individual I27’s birth date. The ‘2 DATE 7 APR 1949’ record specifies the date and since level 2 is greater than level 1, the DATE record is associated with the preceding BIRT record. Finally, the ‘1 FAMC F32’ record tells us that the preceding DATE and BIRT records are complete and that the current individual is a child in family F32 (Note that F32 may or may not be defined when this record is parsed.) Finally, the ‘0 NOTE’ record tells us that the definition of individual I27 is complete (because we found another level 0 record).
Note that IDs of both individuals and families are arbitrary strings. You should NOT assume that all IDs have any specific format. I will test your program with you a variety of id formats.
The Wikipedia entry for GEDCOM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEDCOM has a nice introduction with pointers to more information. Family Echo http://www.familyecho.com and Geni http://www.geni.com allow you to create your family tree online and export it later in GEDCOM format. They are free, but they require you to create an account. Geni has a social networking component to its product. It will email you with reminders of birthdays and anniversaries of your relatives. You may want to try out one of these systems to see how information is recorded in GEDCOM files.
For this project, we are going to work with a subset of GEDCOM, and we will assume that all records are syntactically well-formed. That is, all records will start with a level number in the first character of the record, have a legal tag, and will have arguments in the proper format. Also, only one blank space will be used to separate all fields. Here is a table describing all of the tags needed for the project:
This was informaton provided to our team by Professor Richard Ens
Open into the /test directory and run the following command
python3 -m unittest
This will proceed to run all tests based on the following naming convention: test_usXX.py
The following were contributing team members:
@ming1in
@arana23
@suzyshailesh
@mmccree1
@pdamiano-11
@gracemiguel
@samanthainneo99