New Draft Standards Released

The Technical Standing Committee is happy to announce that several drafts have reached the point of public draft release.   Since our last public releases in September 2016, we have been working to resolve issues identified in the last set of drafts and provide a firm foundation for additional future extensions.  This release primarily provides a foundation layer on which future public-facing standards can be built.   Work continues on a full Citation Elements Vocabulary, on the Extended Legacy Format (ELF, a document model and file format we hope will be fully compatible with current uses of GEDCOM 5.5.1 but more readily extended, as discussed in the “Progress on ELF” thread last October), and bindings for Citation Elements in both ELF and GEDCOM-X.  However, in working on these it became clear that a variety of additional foundational mechanisms were needed, which foundations are presented in the current set of drafts.  While this material is […]

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BetterGEDCOM Archive

FHISO has managed to resurrect an archive copy of the BetterGEDCOM wiki — the precursor of FHISO — under their domain name. The pages are based on a WikiSpaces export made after WikiSpaces locked the site in 2016, and because of this it lacks style information and does not include dynamic pages (such as “Recent Changes”) that WikiSpaces had been providing.

The archive may be found at:

https://archive.fhiso.org/BetterGEDCOM/

That link goes to an index page we added as part of the archiving process; the original home page may be found at:

https://archive.fhiso.org/BetterGEDCOM/HOME.html

Note that there isn’t (yet) a ‘search’ function and so it’s currently more browse- than search-able, but it acknowledges the huge effort and deep insights contributed by so many people on multiple topics, many of which FHISO has yet to revisit.

FHISO Board Meeting 23 January 2018

The FHISO Board met by Google Hangout on 23 January 2018 at 18:00 UTC. Subjects covered included legal status, finances, technical work, outreach, bylaws, and RootsTech.

The minutes of this meeting are available here: https://fhiso.org/minutes/2018-01-23/

FHISO Article

A detailed but readable blog-post summarising FHISO’s history and recent progress may be found at: Thither FHISO.

FHISO Board Meeting 31 October 2017

The FHISO Board met by Google Hangout on 31 October 2017 at 1800 UTC. Subjects covered included finances, legal status, possible amendments to bylaws, extended organisational period, technical work, Web site, and outreach,

The minutes of this meeting are available here: https://fhiso.org/minutes/2017-10-31/

FHISO Board Meeting 12 September 2017

The FHISO Board met by Google Hangout on 12 September 2017 at 1800 UTC. Subjects covered include their finances, domain names, technical work, and the website.

The minutes of this meeting are available here: http://fhiso.org/minutes/2017-09-12/

Second Release of Draft Standards for Public Comment

A little over two months ago we released our first two draft standards on Citation Elements: one on General Concepts such as the data model, the other giving RDFa bindings for tagging citation elements in HTML formatted citations.  This generated some very useful discussion which identified many places where the documents could be improved.   Most consequentially, we agreed to change the following three points:

1. Remove the notion of a layer identifier and defer metadata support for the time being.

2. Change all our http: IRIs to https: due to security and privacy concerns.

3. Expand the notion of a translation set into a more general localisation set to allow a combination of structured and unstructured values.

We have now applied these changes, and have also added significantly to the number of examples and explanatory notes in the documents.  The new documents can be found linked from our public drafts page:

    https://tech.fhiso.org/drafts/

It has […]

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Draft Citation Standards for Public Comment

FHISO has reached an important milestone by releasing its very first draft standards for public comment.   1) Citation Elements: General Concepts

Presents the relationship between formatted citations and citation elements; presents a model for layered citations; presents a solution for replicated data in different languages or scripts; discusses subtyping, extensions, constraints, and cardinality; describes preservation of structure in list-flattening formats; provides all needed information for creating serialization formats and data model bindings.

   http://fhiso.org/TR/cev-concepts

2) Citation Elements: Bindings for RDFa

Presents a data model binding and serialization as RDFa attributes in HTML or XML, and thus for semantic markup of a formatted citation in HTML. An example of a list-flattening format and proof of concept that the concepts document is sufficient to define a data model binding.

   http://fhiso.org/TR/cev-rdfa-bindings

A list of current drafts can be accessed at <http://tech.fhiso.org/drafts/>.  We welcome any and all comments on these on the tsc-public mailing list <http://tech.fhiso.org/tsc-public>. […]

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FHISO Board Meeting 13 June 2017

The FHISO Board met by Google Hangout on 13 June 2017 at 1800 UTC. Subjects covered include their legal status, finances, extending existing memberships, technical project team, and publication of imminent draft standards.

The minutes of this meeting are available here: http://fhiso.org/minutes/2017-06-13/

FHISO Board Meeting 6 March 2017

The FHISO Board met by Google Hangout on 16 March 2017 at 1300 UTC. Amendments of the Bylaws were proposed: (A) to remove references to the Membership Standing Committee (MSC) from the Bylaws; (B) to rename the Technical Standing Committee officers to be consistent with the newly renamed Membership Coordinators; and (C) to make various other minor editorial changes to the Bylaws. A revised Appeals Process Policy was circulated, including changes discussed in the earlier Board Meeting.

The minutes of this meeting are available here: http://fhiso.org/minutes/2017-03-16/ Previous Board minutes may be found here: http: http://fhiso.org/minutes