Evidence and Conclusion Modelling in Behold - Sat, 12 Nov 2011

In preparation for Version 1.0, I am updating the Behold website to make sure all pages are up to date. When I got to the For You page, I added and moved around a few of the Behold benefits.

But the one I needed to add was: “19. Evidence/Conclusion Modelling”. I summarize it as:

Problem: Your current program has no ability to properly document the evidence you used and the conclusions you formulated.

Solution: Behold’s source-based data entry is the first step. Each source you use becomes evidence - evidence you use to formulate a conclusion. While you enter your sources, Behold will make it easy for you to add your conclusion information to your family information while quickly linking it to the evidence.

Benefits: You’ll never forget how you arrived at your conclusions. You will in the future be able to update your data with confidence as you compare your new evidence to your past evidence to allow you to properly modify your conclusions.

This is such a dramatic idea, that it is important to emphasize it here in this post. I previously blogged about the idea back in January in my post: I have Evidence About the Future of Behold

Over at BetterGEDCOM, where I’ve been a fairly active participant, my simple ideas of connecting the conclusions directly to the evidence (i.e. sources) are by some not seen as adequate. They are looking at much more complex ways of representing the evidence/conclusion model that involve intermediate levels of information with assertions and other complexities.

To me that’s fine in a theoretical aspect - to flesh out what’s really going on. From a practical viewpoint, I want to put together a software product that encourages people to properly document their sources and be able to describe how they came to their conclusions. To encourage this requires a simplicity and ease of use that can involve no complication.

Few genealogists document how their conclusions derive from their evidence. That’s because there aren’t any programs out there that make this easy to do. This will be a major goal for me after Version 2.0 of Behold comes out. Then we’ll see how good a job I do.