Relationships & writing catalog data to IDimager ICS schema

[Mke]

I'd like to propose a change to the operation of the option to 'Write catalog data to IDimager ICS scheme' for relationships.

I have relationships set up so that when I add a geographically located building (such as a railway station, museum, church, etc), two labels are assigned; the name of the particular building is added to my 'Places' hierarchy, and the category of building is added to my 'Building Type' hierarchy. It works very well and I use it extensively, not just for buildings.

When the relationship data is written to the ICS schema, it should be enough to just write the details of the relationship between these two labels - e.g. that 'Railway Station A' is related to 'Railway Stations' (and how). That, theoretically, would be sufficient to reconstruct the relationship if the catalogue became corrupted.

Instead, the data includes all of the siblings sharing the relationship. That is, one image of one railway station has embedded in it the name (and relationship reference, path, etc.) of every railway station in my catalogue - which must be into the hundreds.

While causing no particular problem, this does seem to be an excessive level of data redundancy...

BTW, I was going to add this to Mantis, but it seems that V7 hasn't been added yet (though it's not V7 specific).

[Hert]

You assume that both related catalog labels in a relationship are always assigned to every image where either of the two catalog labels is assigned. That is probably the case in your catalog but is no guarantee.
When reconstructing the catalog based on ICS, the relationships where not both labels are assigned, also need to be reconstructed.

e.g. "John" is related to "Honda" as "owns/owned by". There is not a single image in the catalog that has both "John" as well as "Honda" assigned to them. Yet, when reconstructing the catalog the relationship should also be reconstructed.

[Mke]

You assume that both related catalog labels in a relationship are always assigned to every image where either of the two catalog labels is assigned.

Sorry, I should have been clearer in what I was thinking...

e.g. "John" is related to "Honda" as "owns/owned by". There is not a single image in the catalog that has both "John" as well as "Honda" assigned to them. Yet, when reconstructing the catalog the relationship should also be reconstructed.

...I'm thinking that it is sufficient that each 'child' image records who it's parent is, in order to recreate the relationship.

That is, if images of "Honda", "Ford" and "General Motors" all record that they are "owned by" John as he "owns" them , it's possible to reconstruct that John owns all three in an "owns/owned by" relationship, even if he is absent from all of the photos. Rather than every photo of John needing to record a list of everything that he owns as well

The only thing that couldn't be recreated is a relationship where there are no photographs of the child. For example if someone had also set up a relationship in which John also owns "Chrysler", but there are no photos of "Chrysler". I'm sure that I do have a few such relationships where photos are pending, but as there are no photos it wouldn't really concern me that those relationships couldn't be recreated. In fact, I'm sure that I'd never remember that I had once created the relationship, unless it was within the past few days!

BTW, I see that a relationship can now be defined as an "alias" from Build 4390 - that's a good idea