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pcplantdb - Re: [pcplantdb] Job One

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  • From: Bear K <bear@ursine-design.com>
  • To: Permaculture Plant Database <pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] Job One
  • Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 19:10:32 -0800

Fully agree. I believe I mentioned that I wanted to see the back-end
discussion restarted. I've mentioned a few DB related ideas without
much response.

Partly due to actually having to learn something about RDF in order to
respond intelligently ;-)
Yeah, sorry, didn't mean to sound pushy.

RDF does look quite interesting and a discussion you missed out on
early on was a desire to make our information accessible to other
systems. We supposed would probably be something XML. RDF may be the
XML technology for this.

As exciting as RDF may be, I'm pretty hesitant to switch chosen
platforms both because of shyness to try out recent technologies early
on and feeling a need to focus on getting promised features into PIW
not learning new stuff (as much as I love that).

Moving to RDF could be a feature of future funding proposal...

Yes, lets not scrap the work you've put into developing the system now. It seems though, that with all the requests to add information and relationships, plants linked to microorganisms, comments linked to their authors, book reference information, etc, that developing the RDBMS schema and handling the code that interfaces with it would build exponentially in complexity (perhaps a slowish curve though?).
So getting the plant information on-line, a got interface and display of the info, using the current system seems like the pressing concern right now, we should perhaps look at this system, and perhaps plan on transitioning to it for Phase 2. It seems like this system matches a lot of what folks were looking for in a system. OOishness, relationships, XML, RDBMS. Honestly, I still need to research this more. Being able to output a standard XML format, then using XSLT as Richard suggests would be great. Transforms for Grokker compatibility, or TouchGraph compatibility, lite PDA client, etc should be within reach then. I'll also work on keeping the HTML and CSS clean, and make sure all styling is in the CSS to allow for new CSS based designs.

Hmm, yes, we could provide a "low bandwidth" style sheet, cut most/all of the images, etc.

I'm thinking of pulling the search box out of front page text, putting it into a right nav block, and having it on all pages. Any objections?
Should we also have a search tab which provides an advanced search page, and is what's shown when results are put up?

Cheers,
Bear





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