[pcplantdb] Mashups and more

Bear Kaufmann bear at ursine-design.com
Wed Jan 25 00:58:07 EST 2006


Hi all,

I've been working on a mashup recently. I'll jump on the Web 2.0 jargon. 
Though I'll have to say Web 2.0 is a little over hyped now.
Anyway, it pulls from Google Images, 'Duke's Phytochemical and 
Ethnobotanical Database', International Plant Names (Inst?) IPNI, GRIN, 
links to Wikispecies (family, genus, species), and will pull from USDA 
plants on the fly.
It's still not perfect, so I'm not going to up load it yet. I'd also 
need to figure out what's fair use and/or proper citation for each 
source. I was inspired by the mashup on ispecies.org.

I've also been working Actionscript. There's an Actionscript compiler 
(Unix bin) which works real well with XCode called MTASC, which 
generates SWF (Flash) files. Honestly, I tried to get TouchGraph up and 
compilable in Eclipse and also XCode, and Java was not treating me well. 
It's not my native tongue, but I'm picking up Actionscript quickly. I'm 
working on adapting an open source physics engine to implement something 
akin to TouchGraph for the RichClient. I'll show you something when it's 
presentable. Plus the current compiled file is 8K, not that it'll remain 
8K, but Flash is optimized for bandwidth and graphics.

Lastly, I wouldn't mind seeing some of the grant money to pay for my 
time. Putting it towards a laptop would give me a bit more time to code 
while I'm commuting this semester.

Cheers,
Bear



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