[Babase] AMOK Questions

Karl O. Pinc kop at meme.com
Mon Jul 14 00:31:46 EDT 2008


I'm a little behind on my mail.  Sorry.

On 07/10/2008 11:00:27 AM, Lacey Maryott wrote:
> Hi All!
> 
>     Susan and I have been discussing how to handle 'immigrant male'  
> Amok's complicated history. We have found conclusively with the  
> genetic paternity analysis Russ did that Amok's parents are BET and  
> NAC.  Given Amok's age estimate, the closest of Betty's offspring,   
> is Billy. The difference in BIL's birthdate and AMO's estimate is  
> only 9 mo (which speaks volumes to our age estimates by the way) so  
> we feel confident concluding that they are one and the same. We want  
> to update AMO's biograph data to match BIL's. The affected data would  
> include pid, mom, birthdate, matgrp, and bstatus.
> 
> BIL's information is as follows:
> 724
> 	BIL 	BILLY 	BET5 	1995-02-28 	 
> 0
> 	M 	 
> 3.00
> 	1997-12-14 	 
> 0
> 	 
> 0
> 
> 
> AMO's information is as follows:
> 1130
> 	AMO 	AMOK 	/NULL/ 	1994-05-26 	 
> 1
> 	M 	 
> 9.00
> 	2007-09-08 	 
> 0
> 	 
> 0
> 
> 
> We wanted to make sure that a) babase will allow the maintenance of  
> both rows have most of the same information and b) that duplicate  
> pids can exist. I think that they can because of the twins cases we  
> have had, but wanted to confirm.

I can't think of why you couldn't make these changes, but I don't
think you want to.  Each row in BIOGRAPH should represent
a unique individual.  If two individuals are found to be the
same, my recommendation would be to get rid of one of the rows
and attach all the data to the other row.  While I don't think
that the validation rules allow this sort of mucking about
when the individual is a female, you might be able to get
away with it with a male.  (The rules for males are not
as tricky, and so I didn't have to take shortcuts that
simply prevent certain operations.)  If nothing else
it's possible to temporally turn off most of the validation
and make "impermissible" changes. Alternately, old data
can be deleted and new data entered.  (That will always
work, but could be labor intensive.  Or maybe it wouldn't
be so hard after all if you dumped the data, changed it,
deleted it, and reloaded the changed data.)

If you give two rows in BIOGRAPH the same Pid that
makes them twins, and we don't have a case of twins here.

Why would you still want to have two separate rows?

> Also, should the bioid be changed or maintained?

Bioid is unique for each row and shouldn't be changed.  (There's
probably a rule preventing it's change.)

> 
> It also seems important to be able to note somewhere in babase that  
> these individuals are one and the same, and Susan proposes a table  
> called 'identity notes' or something to that effect for storage of  
> this info.  As we continue doing genetic work, it is likely we will  
> encounter other situations where immigrant males will actually be  
> found to be one of our own.

I'm not sure what such a table buys you from a database query
perspective.  And if you're not going to get anything extra
out of queries, why have the table?  (Of course it's perfectly
valid to just want a place to put the information, just consider
whether the database is the best place.)

On the other hand, I could see a table called something like
ALTERNATE_SNAMES.  It'd have, say, 5 rows:

Asnameid  Integer used for a row id.
Sname   The real sname of the individual
Nick   The alternate sname of the individual
Date   The date the alternate sname was assigned
Notes  (text)  As much comment as you'd like about why the
         alternate sname exists.

That way when you've got data outside Babase with the "bad" sname
in it you can still work with the data and link it to the "good"
sname.

"Inside" babase I'd still prefer that 1 baboon means 1 row in
BIOGRAPH.  IMO moving away from that is going to cause real
headaches.


> 
> If any problems pop out to anyone, please let us know. We are just  
> trying to get a feel for whether or not this will work, and whether  
> it is the best way to handle the situation.

It could be time for a phone call.

Karl <kop at meme.com>
Free Software:  "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
                  -- Robert A. Heinlein



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