pcplantdb

[Bear K <bear@ursine-design.com>]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for all the good and interesting emails today. Do we have an 
archive up that Rich can use?

News on the personal front, I took a bit of a fall today on my bike, 
got a bit scraped up, and my hand is sprained, so I won't be typing as 
much (or at least as fast) for a little while. But don't worry, I'm 
still here. :-)

Good to hear of your XML-RPC escapades Chad. I think this will come in 
real handy when we want to build out a TouchGraph client. I'll need to 
luck at the engine a bit more, but I believe data comes via XML-RPC.

Regarding Andy's project, we should research what XML/RDF formats have 
been developed for Event/Orginization information, and perhaps think of 
using a standard for interoperability. I know there's work in this 
arena going on.

Regarding book references, etc.....It seems like the text entries 
should perhaps be considered roughly equivalent to comments. One thing 
Jim talked about was reputation and knowing the source of info. Which 
is what the footnotes provide. We know the source, and who entered it. 
At one of the PlaNetwork conferences there was discussion of Douglas 
Engelbart's (a net pioneer) vision of the web was/should be back in the 
70's. Thinking that each paragraph, or sentence of text should be 
referencable via URL, so people could comment on, quote, etc it. 
Perhaps this is something we could consider? Sentences come from a 
specific book, entered by a specific person, referring to Plant Habits. 
People could append a comment on that, say they've experienced 
something different, etc. Clients/users could opt to view just the 
upper level/high "informative" score information. How hard would that 
be to implement such a fine grained hierarchy in an RDBMS?

Also, on the "TouchGraph, grokking how to visualize this stuff" 
subject...
I hope people have kind of played with TouchGraph or systems like it to 
understand what I'm saying, but:
A user could "anchor" (so the nodes aren't pushed/pulled around) a few 
query items: "height is around 40 feet", "is edible", "nectar 
producing", etc. Place each in a separate part of the screen. Results 
would come in, matching at least 2 (1,3,controllable) properties. Items 
nearest abs(result height-40 feet)=zero are pulled to the height 
element with more force, also pulled to the other query items each 
result matches.  Thus results get clustered. The effect is like having 
a multi-axis graph, but you can use as many as you want. I think using 
something like this as the basis of the UI is nice. It's simple enough 
to understand, implement, and is relatively powerful. You could also 
anchor a few species (/elements) down, and see the relationships and 
possible connections between them. How to quickly select from available 
query options is a little UI question.

OK, enough typing, need to rest my hand.

Cheers everyone,
Bear