Genealogy Standards

There are a variety of things called standards in genealogical technology. None are currently standards the way that, e.g. HTML is a standard. Some of the things listed here, like GEDCOM 5.5, are de facto standards; others, like FHISO, are groups striving to develop a more formal standard.

In alphabetical order, a few of the more-discussed standards and standards groups are

• BetterGEDCOM: as of November 2012, this is an active wiki associated with FHISO with extensive lists of requirements for a desirable genealogical data format standard.
• FHISO: as of November 2012, this is an collection of genealogical groups with the goal of creating widely-acceptable genealogical standards. Their website does not suggest they have begun the process of creating said standards yet.
• GEDCOM: a series of data formats released by FamilySearch that have become the de facto standard interchange format for genealogical data. Wikipedia has a summary of the history, pros, and cons of GEDCOM.
• GEDCOMX: An effort to modernize GEDCOM led by FamilySearch, a self-proclaimed standard until 29 August 2012; now (November 2012) an open-source data model.
• schema.org/historical-data: A microformat for marking genealogical and historical information, with the HTML 5 microdata standard as an intended target.

Other discussions of data formats include Tamura Jones's site and BetterGEDCOM's list.