pcplantdb

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

Hi Rich,

Sorry to get back late on this one. But yes, good stuff. This is why I 
had interest in RDF and talked about it (way?) back.
Imagine if we could take a plant name, and check it against a list of 
nurseries, or seed sources. They could respond with an "In Stock", "Not 
Found/Carried", etc. When a plant is looked at, we can show who carries 
it. To save bandwidth one could catch the requests, and store a triplet 
from the plant object to the nursery connected by the current state. 
Sort the nursery listing by the lat/long radius from user.
You could do queries against photo-archives, USDA plants, etc, and show 
those extra sources. One might need to build a layer between some, who 
might just have a CSV list of plants in their database that just gets 
run through. Ideally at some point, all of these things could talk to 
each other, with one standard.

Hopefully the above was understandable.

Also, re: Lawrence's last post. The folks at Planetwork are involved in 
developing an i-name system, which would provide authentication via one 
name/password to services that use it (ie hopefully all at some point. 
:-) Not unlike MS Passport on their sites. Anyway, there was a lot of 
talk around trust, and a trust network, having brokers that handle the 
data, and only release it to those with high levels of trust. Your full 
name might be public, address for friends/people you exchanged business 
cards with, etc. So yes, there is a lot of work going on in this arena. 
See http://2idi.com/index.php

Anyway, I'll be out of town for a while, have a good one everyone.

Cheers,
Bear