Permaculture Database

[Rich Morris <mailinglists@pfaf.org>]

Lawrence F. London, Jr. wrote:
> Paul Cereghino wrote:
> > Rich this is very interesting... I have been wondering about Wikis for a 
> > long time but had no idea what they could do.
> > Let me get this strait.  You took your PFAF database, and used a custom 
> > module to use it to create a massive Wiki with an article for each 
> > plant, assigning categories to specified fields.  The Wiki then
> >
> > Once you create the wiki, is it then detached from the source data?
>
> If so, does it (the wiki derived from the database) become a static dataset, 
> not allowing input?
> Is new data entered into the database which then (cron job) refreshes and 
> updates the wiki?

> Or can data in the wiki be edited, and if so is it locked within it or can 
> new data be extracted
> and imported into the proper places in the database? Or can new data be 
> entered into the wiki and
> the db simultaneously?
>
> So where do users submit input, wiki or db?
Users can edit the the wiki, by clicking on the edit tab at the top of
the window. This will take you to a form like
http://www.pfaf.org/wiki/index.php?title=Cichorium_intybus&action=edit

See
http://www.pfaf.org/wiki/index.php/Help:Contents
for some brief editing help.

After editing the table of properties will be re-populated.

Yes there are issues of maintaining compatability with the traditional
MS-Access SQL database. Eventially I'd like to move to a situation where
we migrate the pfaf data entirely to the wiki. The current website
update cycle is a nightmare, which I haven't done for over a year now
;-(. Having it entierly online just keeps things constantly up to date.

Currently I've got some scripts which generate the content of the wiki
from the database. It might be possible to do the reverse process, the
fixed properties, height/width etc are easily extractable from the xml
format output, or a query or the properties table in the database for
the wiki. Text fields are harder as this would require parsing the
wikicode, and would break if a an editor decided to create a new section
such as 'folklore'.

The issue of a new section is interesting, in a traditional database a
new section would require a change in the schema of the DB, with a wiki
thats not a problem.

Paul:
> What is a semantic style element?

Semantic is sort of defined as meaning?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic

There has been a long push towards shifting the display oriented markup
of html <h1>Title of article</h1>, which specifies purely how things
should be displayed to a semantic style, where tags are used to define
the meaning of each element <title>Title of article</title>, and
presentation left to CSS.

Much of the XML focus has been directed at semantic markup. In XML in a
nutshell they make an distinction between data-centric XML and
document-centric XML. Data-centric is basically an xml format closely
mapped to a database schema, document-centric is more akin to a
wordprocessor document, a continuous stream of text, with inline tags in
the main stream of text.

HTML can be considered a document-centric format with presentation
elements marked up.

The wikitext I've used is a document-centric format with semantic
elements marked up.

> What you refer to as the 'template mechanism' -- is this a tool in the
wiki toolkit?

This is a feature of the MediaWiki software, I'm not sure if its used in
other wiki software. Templates are sort of an equivilent to #define in
C. If the wikicode contains
        {{welcome|Paul Cereghino}}
then the wiki-page Template:Welcome is included. Template welcome might
contain the text
        Hello {{{1}}}, welcome to our wiki.
and the end result would be
        Hello Paul Cereghino, welcome to our wiki.

> Can you identify a
free info source that can give me an understanding of exactly what a
wiki is doing, how the interface works with the data, and the vocabulary
that goes along with that so I can communicate better.

Erm, http://en.wikipedia.org/ is a fairly good source for most things. I
tend to use this as a starting off point for most queries and then
follow links to further info.

Rich
--
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