GENTECH is a genealogy society for bridging technology and genealogy. They wanted to develop a technical definition for many of the terms and reports commonly used in family history. Numerous developers were writing programs and using a protocol named GEDCOM to export and import information, but it only exchanged chart information. This was frowned on by traditional genealogists, who draw a clear distinction between evidence and conclusions and feel like conclusions without the supporting evidence are useless.
Most interesting business challenge: First, we needed to get a group that would be respected by the non-participants. We selected three leading software developers, and three prominent traditional researchers. To that we added three representatives of GENTECH, and a facilitator. The first JAD session was held in Rochester in August of 1996. The project took three years, because the groups had different languages, different domains of expertise, and they only met three times a year for three days. The GENTECH Genealogical Data Model was published in May of 1998.
Most interesting technical challenge: to articulate the data types. This was especially complicated for the audit trail to link evidence to conclusions. The participants insisted that they be able to not only track the information about this deduction, but that the system allow others to add their train of thinking to it. The final product was an ERD with 30 objects. At about that time, the Mormon Church published GEDCOM future directions and it contained 300 objects. It was my opinion that they used far too many, and that GENTECH didn't use enough -- they avoided decomposing names, dates, and places.
Buzzwords: JAD, ERD