pcplantdb

[John Schinnerer <john@eco-living.net>]

Aloha,

> I guess I missed your request for funds John, because noone yet has been 
> turned down once the group gave the go ahead for me to write a check.

No worries, everyone else must have missed it too.  Probably it was when 
most all of us were AWOL.

> I will have to defer to other programmers on the list to guide me as to 
> whether this project is worthwhile or not, I certainly hope so!

You don't need to defer at all.  My whole point is that everydays users 
aren't going to get much from PIW at present.
You can go to the current PIW and try some searching yourself and see 
what you get.
Unless I enter a known latin name or something very simple like 'plum', 
all I mostly get is hundreds of hits that seem to have very little to no 
relevance to what I searched for.

> I would appreciate more feedback from those of you who know how data 
> bases work and what still needs to be done.  If we had a short list of 
> what has been accomplished and what needs to be done I think it would 
> help us all.

What needs to be done is to organize this like a 'real' project (whether 
commercial or open source).
That means data scoping and design and normalization and functional (and 
other) specifications and all kinds of stuff that was barely or mostly 
never done.

Otherwise it will remain a handful of well-meaning folks hacking 
together bits of often very clever stuff with no coherence and little 
real-world usefulness.

As to database stuff...three categories of applications to consider, and 
the PIW project intent so far has been to some extent spread across all 
three, although we have only actually worked on creating the first.

1) Relational database (RDB) - for storing and retrieving table- and 
list-friendly sorts of data, hard information that is relatively 
well-structured and categorizable and slice-and-dice-able.

2) Content Management System (CMS) - for storing and retrieving complex 
objects of various kinds that do not fit well into an RDB type of 
approach.  This is typically complex human-generated content such as 
word processing and spreadsheet documents (and any other 
'business/office' type documents, a.k.a. 'content'), presentations, 
images with associated information (captions, media info, etc.), 
multimedia files, and other files/BLOBs (Binary Large OBjects) not 
easily broken down into RDB-friendly bits. Normally provides work-flow 
tools (submit, review, edit, approve, publish, retract, etc.) as well as 
simple storage and retreival.

3) Wiki and similar - for very loosely structured ad-hoc user/community 
input and editing and other bits and pieces created and added informally.

hi ho,
John S.

--

John Schinnerer - MA, Whole Systems Design
------------------------------------------
- Eco-Living -
Whole Systems Design Services
People - Place - Learning - Integration
john@eco-living.net
http://eco-living.net