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pcplantdb - Re: [pcplantdb] technical details, plan, re: synthesis

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  • From: Richard Morris <webmaster@pfaf.org>
  • To: pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] technical details, plan, re: synthesis
  • Date: Tue, 03 Aug 2004 10:11:28 +0100

Chad Knepp wrote:
Lawrence F. London, Jr. writes:
> If it is done on ibiblio I can be counted on to help out in a
> variety of ways for the long haul. I plan to focus more of my
> attention on HG than on any other web projects I work on, now or
> later.

I have a high degree of confidence that ibiblio will be able to
provide what we need regarding a zope platform, even if it isn't right
away. We also have the expertise between us to do it ourselves or
help them do it for us. Zope really is common/popular enough to be
available almost everywhere. I am a little surprised that they don't
have an install there already, but it's no big deal. Anyway, I don't
think that the fact that ibiblio doesn't already have Zope should be a
big factor in deciding whether to go the Zope route or the Eden/MySQL
route.

I am very strongly in favor of a system eventually on ibiblio,
for a number of reasons.
1) There are some great datasets already there namely
permaculture mailing list
pc wiki
lots more lawrence has tucked away there
2) Connections with the wider community
For this to work were are going to need more datasets
from other permaculture praticioners. Theres a phrase
over here "its not what you know its who you know"
and the chap with the greatest connections in our group
is Lawerence.
3) No long term maintanace at the sysadmin level. No long term
server costs, high bandwidth, and a host which will
be there for a very long time to come. Suportive sysadmins.

I'm fairly agnostic as to zope, I'm happy to go with it,
but there are many other systems which could do it as well.
For instance perl has objects good DB connectivity and
a vast library.

I've also developed a proof of concept database system on ibiblio
at
http://www.ibiblio.org/pfaf/pcplantdb/index.php
it look terible and does not have google type search but it does
illustrate many of the features we need:
Allows additions of information to db
Extensible, very easy to add a new field.
Handles other objects as well as plants.
Beginings of support for users with varying
levels of permision.
Allows a strong atribution model. Footnotes are used
to indicate who wrote what. Contributions can be woven into the

different sections in the main text.
XML output.
Fairly well documented code and table structure. Uses a javadoc type system to make the tables self documenting.

The question which has been coming up in my mind reciently is what are the objects? What are the initial thoughts as to what objects
are used to represent the data.

We could have:
users - holds data about a user
things - data about a thing (plant, guild, keylines, ...)
plants - sub class of thing plant specific info
section - a specific section of information about a thing
keyword - a key word about the plant or thing
relationships - a link between two things
contribution - an individual contribution by an particular user about a thing.
resource - some other resources like photos, videos mp3's.

I think we need to have a clear idea about the object/data structure so that we can ensure that the platform we choose can suport our needs.

Do we need
sub-classing of objects?
encapsulation - tying methods and data together?
extensible objects?

I'm not 100% convinced that objects are essential.
A RDBM scheme can handle most of our needs.
Its fairly straightforward to go from an database record to an object.

Laters

Rich

--
Plants for a Future: 7000 useful plants
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