Surety Schemes

During your genealogical research, you will get a lot of information from a lot of different sources. Some of them are reliable and some of them are not. But you may want to have all the information in your system, the most reliable, as well as uncertain. But it is not the best idea to mix the reliable information with fable or fairy-tale like information since you will probably forget very soon what is true and what is not. To help user to manage the situation, GenTle provides user with possibility to evaluate data according to its surety. You can label information with a label that determines how you've got the information and how sure you are about it. GenTle uses surety schemes to do the job.

With the GenTle, you can define a set of such a labels called Surety Scheme (SS). SS consists of Surety Scheme Parts (SSP) -- items that express a level of surety. User can define as much SSPs as she wants. Each SSP has a name, description and sequence number (for sorting purposes). For instance, you can define three level of surety, represented by three SSPs:

This list forms one surety scheme. GenTle supports more security schemes so that you can have grater scalability and modularity about your surety needs. You can define as much SS as you want.

You need to do several things to take advantage of surety schemes. First of all, you need to define your own surety scheme (or schemes) and its parts. To do so, open Surety Scheme dialog and define SS and SSP in the usual way. Then, it is necessary to assign SS to a project. This can be done via Project Settings dialog. Surety Schemes tab is define on this dialog and you can select SS and preferred SSP there. If you select preferred SSP, it will be preselected in the Surety Scheme Part dialog if no SSP previously selected. More information about project settings is written in the Section called Configuring project in the chapter called Settings>. Having SS assigned to the project, you can select appropriate SSP from the Surety Scheme Part combo-box on relevant dialogs. Following data can be evaluated using surety scheme:

Warning

The Project Settings dialog allows you to change the SS for the project as well but I highly discourage doing so. If you will change your SS during the work on your project, you will loose all surety information you have already introduced. SS should be changed in special cases only, i.a.c. this is not a common praxis. The advantage of having more than one SS defined is in possibility to have different SS for different projects.

Surety Schemes are shared so that you can use it for any project stored in the project depository. GenTle comes with no predefined or default surety scheme; it's up to the user to define her own SS.