[Design] family entries

[Tim Randolph]

A thought about families of entries in address books...

I have long thought it a limitation that in PIMs, it is very difficult 
to share common data between address book entries and impossible to 
relate entries to each other in any kind of meaningful way.

Here is a simplified use case -- it is extensible to many other 
situations:

I enter a friend's contact info.  I occasionally email my friend's 
husband as well, so he should get a separate entry.  They have two kids 
who I would like stay aware of and who might even have their email 
addresses.  These four people share a pool of common data as well as 
the information about who they are to each other (husband/wife, 
mother/daughter, etc).

What I would really like is to be able to enter the common data once 
and note the relationships (which would of course have to be user 
definable but kept consistent by the system.)  From there I would like 
the common data to be seen and editable from with in any entry and I 
would also like the relations to be apparent as any other attribute.  I 
would also like to view "families" when browsing or use them for 
mailing.

Is this doable?  It complicates both UI and data structures, but would 
have some nice payoffs.

The same basic idea would be useful for all kinds of information.  I 
think this is what the RDF idea is getting at, but I would love to see 
it made a bit more concrete in terms of features and functionality.

--Tim