pcplantdb

[Stephanie Gerson <sgerson@stanfordalumni.org>]

Wonderful discussions going on!

Refreshing that we are actually discussing the meat (or shall I say guacamole)
of the project, rather than the logistics.  

A few items:

1.  Thanks to both Lawrence and JohnH for volunteering to be webmasters. 
Who's it going to be?  It appears that both of you are qualified - perhaps
more a matter of time and commitment?

2.  Johns wanted to switch from Bugzilla to Scarab, but looks like Scarab
isn't working and we don't even know if Ibiblio will host it.  Can someone
please ask Ibiblio - preferably Chad or Lawrence who have already been acting
as liaisons?  And Johns, have they gotten their "sandbox" up?

3.  Related, Johns wrote, "no one but myself and Chad even made themselves an
account on bugzilla yet, it would be a
pretty painless switch."  Would you still like us to do so?  I myself am
pretty occupied with grant-seeking activities, but if you would like us to
make accounts, please let us know.

4.  Thanks to Lawrence for getting in touch with Ibiblio again.  

5.  Thanks Bear for his suggestions, and for offering to host.

6.  Please send me your updates and responses to the Lindbergh letter!

7.  Rich asked, "This is really the central question. Where do we position
ourselves on the flatDB -- wiki spectrum?"  I say we position ourselves at
whatever spot on the spectrum is most conducive to acheiving our goal.  And if
it requires innovation on our part, so be it!  As I've said before, this
project will be valuable not only because of its informational content, but
also because of the manner in which information is presented and interacted
with.  PIW could be a model for virtual cross-pollination of information...

8.  Schema stuff looks great.  I'm fascinated.  And I assume now would be a
good time to write up my vision for the UI/User Experience?  Just to see how
it matches up with the code.  Also, I did go through this thread and got the
gist - but Chad, do you think you could write up a short non-technical summary
of how you're organizing the information?  Not only for me to read, but so
that other non-techies (i.e. Scott) can understand and contribute.  We could
even post this on the PIW website (which needs more content anyway).  What do
you think?  Not to give you an extra workload...

S'more work for you (or anyone else): can we (or did we already) devise a list
of PC-centric characteristics that we're going to allow users to search by?  I
remember a thread regarding "attributes" a while back, but it might be nice to
create an actual list of attributes, and post it on the website as well -
welcoming feedback.

Another idea.  It would be pretty fantastic if you could sort results by more
than one attribute, i.e. sort by edibility and water needs.  A friend once
told me about a 3-dimensional sorting scheme, where you could sort by 3
attributes (x-axis, y-axis, and z-axis) and see the information mapped onto a
cube.  Is this useful?  Interesting?  Nonsense?  

A few other comments on schema stuff:

-Chad wrote, "Well, I keep coming back to the problem of having a new table
for every kind of comment. I'm sure we can't think of all the kinds of
comments/text blobs that we are going to eventually want, so I keep looking
toward creating the generic concept of a comment."  Why not keep it general
now (i.e. "additional comments") and allow the tables to emerge with user
input?  Once we have a 'pile' of comments to work, the tables they would be
split into might be more clear.  This could also relate to our position on the
flat DB --- wiki spectrum - not necessarily imposing strict tables and not
necessarily allowing users to freely create their own, but something in
between?

-Regarding the discussion between Johns and Rich:
Johns wrote, "Isn't the whole point of Relational DB (as opposed to
heirarchical DB or flat-file DB) that one can do all sorts of relational
operations on the stored data to generate more complex/interrelated output?" 
Yes!

Rich responded, "Structurally a tree structure is richer than a relational db.
You can represent a relation structure in a tree, but can't always represent a
tree in a relational structure."  Yes but we would like the message to match
the medium.  And if the message is a tree...  This goes back to Ecosystem
Information Engineering - how to mimic the informational content in the
informational architecutre and code.  Still planning to get back to you on
that one, promise.

Rich also wrote, "Doing more complex things on the web server gets hard. What
sort of interface is needed to define a more complex operation?"  Yes it gets
hard, but let's stay true to our intention (easy for me to say, I ain't gotta
code nothin').  And what sort of interface, you ask?  Relationships of
relationships of relationship...webs of webs of webs...not that we have to use
them, but remember GBI's?  And remember (holy g, it feels like so long
ago)...*sigh*...Thinkmap?

Wow, we've been at this for over a year - almost a year and half in fact... 
Now I'll eat guacamole to that!  

Enjoy your weekends...

peace
*Stephanie

p.s.  Please remember to respond to the Lindbergh letter.


+++++++++++++++
Stephanie Gerson
sgerson@stanfordalumni.org
(c) 415.871.5683


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