I have some research projects coming up and I would like to try to enter these into a database. I read a little about Parcel Fabric in ARC and how you can assign dates to parcels to use them in some sort of timeline. As I only have one seat of ARC 10, I wonder is there an equivalent in QGIS?
Parcel Fabric is an ArcGIS geodatabase construct, relying on specialized tables and stored procedures. There is no equivalent in QGIS (many would say that it a good thing-- Parcel Fabric is *very* difficult to implement for large parcel databases). If you just want to track cadastral chronology, what you could do is assign data fields of "Date_Recorded" and "Date_Superseded" for each parcel. A more complete schema would include the antecedent parcel link(s) so a complete timeline of parcels could be established.
A good slideshow on temporal fact tables is at http://www.slideshare.net/davidemauri/temporal-snapshot-fact-tables.
Rudy Stricklan, RLS, GISP