Data Inheritance

In using Aeon Timeline I am finding that I am entering a lot of data multiple times which seems somewhat redundant. For instance, let’s say I have a number of events and these events have data types for venue and location (town/city). The venue has a physical relationship with the location yet for every event I have to enter the venue and the location. It would be such a time saver if when entering the venue, it automatically added the related location.

I do understand that I could have a single data type where the entry could contain the venue & location as a single data element but I would lose a lot of functionality with this approach if for instance I wanted to see all events in London, irrespective of which venue they took place at.

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I faced a similar issue to what you describe, and I “solved” it by doing this:

  1. Created a bunch of nested locations, with A level being country, B level being county/council area/state/what-have-you, C level being city, and D level being a venue in said city.
  2. Went through and rewrote all of the child locations such that their parent locations were listed in the titles of each location.

By the time I was done, the name of each location ended up being a huge string of nested locations that looked a bit like: Scotland - Argyll and Bute - Oban - Markie Dans
The whole thing became very convoluted and was far too much work for what little was actually gained. Also, as you said, it severely limits functionality, as now I can only see what happens at a specific venue in a city instead of everything in that city across all venues.

So, yeah, some way of linking these would be great. In my example, countries, counties/council areas/states/what-have-you, city, and venue are all separate and nestable data types, so assigning them to different relationships based on the data type and parent values would be an awesome solution.

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I’m very mindful about seeing how I am going to be able to review and filter the data via the timelines before entering too much data. For me having the address criteria separated gives me greater flexibility, but requires more input which the proposed solution would help overcome. But I don’t think its benefits are limited only to address type data.

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Agreed. I can think of numerous problems this could potentially solve!