<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
http-equiv="Content-Type">
</head>
<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 11/17/2013 03:34 PM, Sasa Sullivan
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CAGKS-uu3hcBj34hNo6F3WDFvUPA=MFt6RcoLnauJXgWAk=UyyQ@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">
<div>
<div>
<div>Hi Lee,
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Hopefully I can be a bit clearer here, if not please
do not hesitate to let me know, either on this post or
to my email, I have tried to search online and the help
functions for similar questions and responses before I
posted to this board. Your questions/statements in bold
text.<br>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif"><strong>But
I could be misunderstanding your intention. Some
more detail would be helpful.</strong></span></div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif"></span> </div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif">The
people concerned have been matched to each other
via DNA, their mission is to find the most recent
common ancestors, this by looking at genealogical
data which consists of surnames and locations. I
don't want to include the questions about DNA as
that is another matter and once I can find answers
to this question I can probably answer that one
myself.</span></div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif"></span> </div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif"><strong>What
is a record in you data?</strong></span></div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif"></span> </div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif">A
record consists of one person with multiple
geographical locations and surnames who need to
find a common location(s)/surname(s) with other
people who also have multiple geographical
locations and surnames (some small groups of
people are linked to each other as well). There is
never just one surname and/or location per person</span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<br>
This seems to be outside the "standard" GIS model where an entity
has one location (really one geometry) and a fixed number of clearly
defined attribute columns. Your entities have a variable number of
locations, and perhaps a variable number of attribute columns (the
surnames) as well. Possibly this has some similarity to an animal
tracking model, where each animal has multiple timepoints, and you
might ask where two animals crossed paths. But I am not very
familiar with this field and don't know how easy it would be to
implement in QGIS or any other tool.<br>
<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CAGKS-uu3hcBj34hNo6F3WDFvUPA=MFt6RcoLnauJXgWAk=UyyQ@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">
<div>
<div>
<div>
<div>
<div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif"></span> </div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif"><strong>What
location data do you have per person?</strong></span></div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif"></span> </div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif">Each
person's location numbers are varied, from four
minimum to close to a hundred</span></div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif"></span> </div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif"><strong>At
a guess, this is something that can be done
without any spatial data, i.e.</strong></span></div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif"></span> </div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif">Geocoding
will work best as it does not rely on spellings
with are too varied</span></div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif"></span> </div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif"><strong>Person
A is linked to New York City, Person B is linked
to New York City, therefore Person A is linked
to Person B.</strong></span></div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif"></span> </div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif">Yes,
however Person A and B also have 50 other
locations that need to be checked against each
other. The data might say NY, NYC, or NY City or
New York, NY and other variations, geocoding
allows for the different ways a locations is
represented I do not want to rely on how others
spell their locations and I need to share them on
a map.</span></div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif"></span><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif"></span> </div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif">Initially
the people are linked to each other on one or more
chromosomes, I can sort that in Excel. There might
be another type of programs that can handle my
questions however I do not know of any names, then
I can transfer the results into QGIS.</span></div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif"></span><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif"></span> </div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif"><strong>This
is something I would tend to do in pure SQL.</strong></span></div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif"> </span><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif"></span></div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif">I
do not know much about programming, beyond what
someone directs me to do and was hoping the query
functions of QGIS would handle what I was asking,
if this were a one to one comparison I could do it
in Excel or a database program, ultimately I need
to put the information on a map</span></div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif"></span> </div>
<div><span
style="font-size:13px;font-family:arial,sans-serif">Thank
you so much for responding, I don't know of a
beginners list to ask these questions. As I write
this perhaps I can geocode and let Excel query the
latitude and longitude for my matches.</span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<br>
Possibly the geocoder outputs some other identifying field like a
standardized name, code, or some unique ID. In which case you could
search for matches on that field, rather than lat-long. <br>
<br>
One thing that might make this easier is to think of a
person_ancestry_locations table with a person ID and a location
(standardized name or code) field, where each person has one record
for each location they are associated with. <br>
<br>
But I can't think of a way to do this in QGIS that isn't incredibly
contorted. I would probably just use QGIS for the final mapping of
common locations.<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
--Lee
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Lee Hachadoorian
Assistant Professor in Geography, Dartmouth College
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://freecity.commons.gc.cuny.edu">http://freecity.commons.gc.cuny.edu</a>
</pre>
</body>
</html>