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pcplantdb - Re: [pcplantdb] Richard Re: dataset and client/server API

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  • From: John Schinnerer <john@eco-living.net>
  • To: pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] Richard Re: dataset and client/server API
  • Date: Mon, 09 Aug 2004 20:44:03 +0000

Aloha,

> The permaculture.info project must
> a) Hold data about a plant
> b) Hold data about other objects/concepts not necessarily just a plant
> c) Hold images, (and later other data formats like mp3's)

c) is BLOBs, basically - up to you how to handle this on back end Chad.
They're all just data files...would be good to have an attribute identifying media/file type. MIME standard would be one way.
I strongly suggest *not* just hoping the file extension will identify it well enough! :-o
I'll break that when I test it with a file attachment from a Mac... ;-)

4) Moderated collaboration with different editing methods for
different types. I personally like a narrower approach than
appendthing.php, like the ability to just edit the soil type.
Moderation is the key to sorting the good information from the
less good. I don't really have a good idea on how to display
differing information in a non-confusing way.

This goes back to one of our grantor's suggestions - two kinds of moderation.
One for relatively "hard" data, the basic stuff, where some limited group of knowledgeable people make sure this sort of data is as correct as it can be known to be.
One for more "soft" types of data coming in from the larger community - situational, locational stuff that may have more narrative/freeform content than the more basic "hard" data. This could be (as Jim suggested) a peer-group moderation system (as on eBay, etc.) where people get rated as to the usefulness, validity, etc. of stuff they put in. Cream floats, bovine excrement sinks...

> b) Allow multiple common names for plants (possibly with locilisation > info describing where the name is used and which language it is in)

Definitely useful...here in Hawai'i (and only here afaik) casaurina is called "ironwood"...took me a looong time to find out what "ironwood" was...lots of other things are called "ironwood" elsewhere in the world...

While this is a nice demostration of inheritance, hard-coding
information about off site links is a bit questionable.

Very questionable. I will break it when I test and it will be a bug... :-)
This has to be something like...

...data not method, possibly as a attribute of the object in the form of
a list of urls.

I have plenty of examples of this on my own long-unmaintained resource links pages. Some of the gov't. sites are the worst! Bureaucratic shuffling, webmaster job security, I dunno...they tweak little bits of the URL because some agency moved to some other sub-agency, and everything is broken (again)...



--

John Schinnerer - MA, Whole Systems Design
------------------------------------------
- Eco-Living -
Whole Systems Design Services
People - Place - Learning - Integration
john@eco-living.net
http://eco-living.net




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