README

Chron

By James Hogan <james@albanarts.com>

Chron is a tool for resolving chronological constraints in genealogies and
chronologies of historical documents such as the Bible.

There are several components:

 - Chron Prolog rules in src/. These are written in Prolog and define the rules
   which datasets can use to describe relationships, chronological events and
   contraints between them. It provides a certain level of abstraction in order
   to generate inferred chronological constraints, and can resolve the
   constraints using clgfd.

 - Chron C++ wrapper library in include/chron/ and src/. This uses SWI-Prolog to
   provides a way to access the Chron data from C++.

 - Chron C++ test program. This imports a dataset and resolves the constraints,
   printing the resulting date ranges out.

 - An external Chron dataset. This is written in Prolog using the Chron Prolog
   rules, and describes the actual relationships, chronological events, and
   constraints between them.

There are some basic tests which may be run on a dataset like this:

  swipl -p chron=src/ -q -s src/check.pl -- --file ../path/to/dataset.pl

Some of these tests compare the output of various generators run on a given
dataset against corresponding .ref files. This allows you to check for changes
in output as a result of chron changes.