pcplantdb

[Richard Morris <webmaster@pfaf.org>]

Martin Naylor wrote:
> hi
> i just posted this on permaculture-oceania list, geez 0!!!

Cool. I was thinking no one had a clue about what I was on about.

> it's good to
> hear you guy's, and your going to get into the permaculture activists, 
> me my self and i have been getting into the moody blues and reading 
> krishnamurti for the last 30 years, god i love this,i need someone to 
> help me build a web site based on this, 

What are your thoughs on what you want in the website?

Check out the Googlezon movie at http://www.robinsloan.com/epic/
for a interesting view on how things might pan out on the web.

Also its worth reading up on the symantic web.

I've been doing a little more reading around on these issues receintly, 
it seems like there are a lot of the technologies we need are sort of in 
place.

Web services description language (WSDL) an XML format which describes
the services that a webserver provides.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_services_description_language

XML Scheme to describe the datatypes for input and output for methods.

SOAP format for messages to from servers.

These are all a bit similar to XML-RPC but a bit richer in terms of 
expressability.

REST is also interesting. It seems to focus on Nouns rather that Verbs.
This might be more what we need, in terms of plants which are really 
none type things.

OpenSearch has a nice standard for search results.

RDF and OWL also seems to fit in the picture somehow.
RDF triples seem to be a nice way to express the data we have.

One of the best articles on this stuff is
The Semantic Web (for Web Developers)
http://logicerror.com/semanticWeb-webdev
Its got ideas about search engines which fit with the ideas in previous 
post.

All this stuff seem reasonably straight forward to implement on top of 
what Chad's doing. We can have frontend which produce output in these 
different formats. There seems to be some python modules to handle a lot 
of this stuff.

Laters

        Rich

> i'll give them moshe
> feldenkrais, awareness through movement, masters and houstons mind 
> games, the complete moody blues,bob dylan, rolling stones, beatels, 
> george harrison, john martyn, jim post, and last but not least john 
> lennon singing mind games, yes!! and i'll even through that in too for 
> totaly free, just go to your local libary,  
> and freinds of the earth
> love and freedom are at the begining
> martin
> ps did i forget jimi hendrix, neil young, santana
> ps any woman looking to live in australia, see me, i'm looking for love
> pss must be totaly realized in the above 
>  
> */ichard Morris <webmaster@pfaf.org>/* wrote:
>
>     Hi Folks,
>     My latest wheeze, not sure if its strictly on topic for
>     permaculture.info but here goes.
>
>     I've been pondering a graphing program which could pull data off any
>     website and produce graphs and charts.
>
>     For example I might wish to create a graph of polulation by
>     countries by
>     pulling data off the CIA world fact website.
>
>     To do this there are basically three components
>
>     external website - writtend in html (hard) or xml (easy)
>     html-microformat tags (easy).
>
>     Scaper programs - these have the responsability for parsing websites
>     and extracting data from them.
>
>     Graphing client - gets data from different scrapers and creates a graph.
>
>     There might be a number of different scraper programs.
>
>     A standard xml scraper which could use an xslt script to pull elements
>     from an xml document. This could also be used with microformats.
>
>     Custom scrapers, tuned for a particular html website. Copes with the
>     indosyncraticies of its format.
>
>     Scrapers for other services.
>
>
>     How this relates to piw.
>
>     PIW server could be a typical exteran website.
>     I could write a scraper to parse the site and pull out data.
>     This would then allow a graphing client to say graph the heights of a
>     selection of trees.
>
>     The same tech could also be used for other clients other than graphs.
>
>     Other elements, there is a need for a standard format for the output of
>     scraper programs. This would need to be generic rather than subject
>     specific, i.e. no asumptions about field names etc.
>
>     Anyway off to school
>
>     Rich