It is always good practice to include definitions of words and concepts in any technical document that will be read or used by less informed people. And I agree 100% that this should be done, IMHO FTM and its programmers and staff are illequiped to undertake this kind of project. I really do not think that they completely understand genealogy, the type(s) of information that can go (and should go) into a data repository and what to call them. This is not FTM fault many of these concepts and idea are argued and discussed regularly among seasoned professional genealogists, so if they are not always in agreement how can FTM who is not.
Many of the current definitions of datapoints are taken from the GEDCOM standard and in many cases the standard does not do a great job of defining the datapoint, and in cases where it does, people have introduced exceptions that are not documented.
Your example regarding "Place" is a great example. As defined by GEDCOM:
'The jurisdictional name of the place where the event took place. Jurisdictions are separated by commas, for example, "Cove, Cache, Utah, USA." '
Most people have no clude regarding the word "jurisdictional". Does this mean places that can hold that type of data? -or- country political jurisdictions -or- Church/religious jurisdictions, -or- something else? The simple example they give is governmental but how do you deal with changes in government and name changes? Place could also include addresses and grave locations. What happens when you only have a name of a place and can't find its geopolitical location?
FTM componds these questions by not supporting all of the GEDCOM which does have a tag that allows the user to tell/record the jurisdictional divisions used in every place tag.
Software companies are very reluctant to force you to do something their way, it will alienate users, so they leave it open to interpretation to cover all users.
I suggest that you join an organization that has set its own standards and guidelines for the software they use.
Many of the current definitions of datapoints are taken from the GEDCOM standard and in many cases the standard does not do a great job of defining the datapoint, and in cases where it does, people have introduced exceptions that are not documented.
Your example regarding "Place" is a great example. As defined by GEDCOM:
'The jurisdictional name of the place where the event took place. Jurisdictions are separated by commas, for example, "Cove, Cache, Utah, USA." '
Most people have no clude regarding the word "jurisdictional". Does this mean places that can hold that type of data? -or- country political jurisdictions -or- Church/religious jurisdictions, -or- something else? The simple example they give is governmental but how do you deal with changes in government and name changes? Place could also include addresses and grave locations. What happens when you only have a name of a place and can't find its geopolitical location?
FTM componds these questions by not supporting all of the GEDCOM which does have a tag that allows the user to tell/record the jurisdictional divisions used in every place tag.
Software companies are very reluctant to force you to do something their way, it will alienate users, so they leave it open to interpretation to cover all users.
I suggest that you join an organization that has set its own standards and guidelines for the software they use.