pcplantdb

[Richard Morris <webmaster@pfaf.org>]

Bear Kaufmann wrote:
> 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.

Yes I remember that. The RDF approach is quite nice and does avoid
some problems with XML. The article http://logicerror.com/semanticWeb-webdev
makes a strong case for advantages of RDF over other methods.
As an example of how this would work in our context would be

<piw/Plants/Salix+Alba> <piw/rdf/CommonName> "White willow"
<piw/Plants/Salix+Alba> <piw/rdf/Family> "Salicaceae"

These are three part things first part lists the object we are 
interested in. Second part lists the type of relationship
and thrid part is another resource.

We'ed need to find some approptiate system for the bit in the middle
either using exsisting ontologies like dublin core.


Just found a site which lists webservices
http://xmethods.net/ve2/index.po
and allows you to do test queries on the sites.

For example there a lat long calculator
http://xmethods.net/ve2/ViewListing.po?key=uuid:F90B2ACA-8C99-9F04-21E7-A455DEC05F1E
which you can test at
http://www.mindreef.net/tide/scopeit/start.do?referer=xmethods&url=http://www.atomic-x.com/xmlservices/latlon.asmx?wsdl
or
http://www.atomic-x.com/xmlconsumer/DesktopDefault.aspx?ctl=latlon

> 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.

I briefly did something like this on pfaf website. I had plant lists for 
three different nursaries which were cross referenced with the database
so when you looked up a plant you could find where to get it from. This 
is very high on the list of questions we get asked.

There a few pricky questions.
Technical: current website list plant lists in hard to process html.
Buisness: Are listing free? Potentially could be some income in it but 
might be problems with non commercial licence.

But these aside all very posible.

One way round technical prob is with open source code. We could 
potentially provide modules which would provide a nice xml output for 
the data. A supplier could link this into their database.

Alternativly we can produce taylored scripts which could parse specific 
website and extract data in required formats.
> Hopefully the above was understandable.

Yep

        Rich