Creating a location-based site involves gathering and displaying a lot of different types of information, so decisions need to be made about the best way to handle various types of data. One of the issues facing the coordinators of the typical project has been the need to manually edit incoming data into a presentable form, so part of the goal for our project is to eliminate this need for excess labor by allowing site visitors to enter their data directly as much as possible.

A very simple starting point for a typical site within our framework would be to provide some basic information about the area, to provide the ability for visitors to the site to contribute their own data and to allow visitors to interact with each other and the sites' coordinators.

Some of the very basic ideas that are suggested as part of a framework are:

• Queries
• Local Resources, such as courthouses, libraries, historical societes, etc.
  

From the basics, we move on to some other areas that are very helpful:

• Township or other local geographic divisions
  
• Churches and cemeteries in the area
• Local newspapers
• Military resources
  

And, of course, it's really a nice idea to have some way of gathering various types of data from site visitors and then displaying it in an organized fashion. Some typically used types of records are:

• Obituaries
• Wills, Will Extracts and Adminstration Records
  
• Birth Records
• Marriage Records
• Burial Records
• Tax and Land Records
• Military Records
  
• Bible Records
• Census Data
• Immigration Records

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the possible data types, but merely a guideline from which to start. There are also a lot of features that could be added to give more depth to a site, such as events calendars, image galleries and resource directories pointing to other useful sources of information.