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  • From: Richard Morris <webmaster@pfaf.org>
  • To: Permaculture Plant Database <pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] status
  • Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 10:46:33 +0000

Bear K wrote:
Hi everyone,

Thanks for all the good and interesting emails today. Do we have an archive up that Rich can use?

Indeed there is on
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/pcplantdb
there is a link to the archive. I managed to catch up on missed posts.

News on the personal front, I took a bit of a fall today on my bike, got a bit scraped up, and my hand is sprained, so I won't be typing as much (or at least as fast) for a little while. But don't worry, I'm still here. :-)

Good to hear of your XML-RPC escapades Chad. I think this will come in real handy when we want to build out a TouchGraph client. I'll need to luck at the engine a bit more, but I believe data comes via XML-RPC.

Regarding Andy's project, we should research what XML/RDF formats have been developed for Event/Orginization information, and perhaps think of using a standard for interoperability. I know there's work in this arena going on.

I've been thinking of RSS or Atom. These are used for Sindication services, spreading of news headlines around the world. I think they could be adapted well to to cope with event listings. Stuff I'm particulary keen on sharing include event listings, contact info/links directories. A brief web search found
Using XML to Share Performing Arts Schedules
http://www.sys-con.com/story/?storyid=45973&DE=1


Regarding book references, etc.....It seems like the text entries should perhaps be considered roughly equivalent to comments. One thing Jim talked about was reputation and knowing the source of info. Which is what the footnotes provide. We know the source, and who entered it. At one of the PlaNetwork conferences there was discussion of Douglas Engelbart's (a net pioneer) vision of the web was/should be back in the 70's. Thinking that each paragraph, or sentence of text should be referencable via URL, so people could comment on, quote, etc it. Perhaps this is something we could consider? Sentences come from a specific book, entered by a specific person, referring to Plant Habits. People could append a comment on that, say they've experienced something different, etc. Clients/users could opt to view just the upper level/high "informative" score information. How hard would that be to implement such a fine grained hierarchy in an RDBMS?

Interesting related piece on Slashdot last week on
Xanadu: The Forgotten Hypertext
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/19/1916218&tid=198&tid=95&tid=126&tid=1
it had this sort of deep linking and also "unbrakable links!" now that would have been nice!

Also, on the "TouchGraph, grokking how to visualize this stuff" subject...
I hope people have kind of played with TouchGraph or systems like it to understand what I'm saying, but:
A user could "anchor" (so the nodes aren't pushed/pulled around) a few query items: "height is around 40 feet", "is edible", "nectar producing", etc. Place each in a separate part of the screen. Results would come in, matching at least 2 (1,3,controllable) properties. Items nearest abs(result height-40 feet)=zero are pulled to the height element with more force, also pulled to the other query items each result matches. Thus results get clustered. The effect is like having a multi-axis graph, but you can use as many as you want. I think using something like this as the basis of the UI is nice. It's simple enough to understand, implement, and is relatively powerful. You could also anchor a few species (/elements) down, and see the relationships and possible connections between them. How to quickly select from available query options is a little UI question.

OK, enough typing, need to rest my hand.

Rich





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