permaculture

[John Schinnerer <eco_living@yahoo.com>]

Aloha,

> It seems to me that at lease some of the hyperlinking tools would
> need to be common to the various websites participating,
> i.e. database features, html tags, server side includes. Website A's
> database with info on eleagnus would need to be acccessable to fields
> in website B's database with info on nitrogen-fixing, drought
> tolerance, fruit bearing, medicinal value.

This seems most easily solved with an object-oriented DB.  If the DBs
are object-based and the objects present a consistent set of methods
(ways of communicating, basically) to the "outside world," it doesn't
matter what the internal implementations of the objects are on any
particular system or what presentation methods are used to display data
obtained from them.

For example, as long as any system can ask any other something like:

get.hardiness('vitis vinifera','F')

...and know that the queried system will return hardiness data in
degrees Farenheit for vitis vinifera (or a standardized "no data"
result), the data acquired can be dealt with however the querying site
chooses to.



=====
John Schinnerer, MA
--------------------
- Eco-Living -
Cultural & Ecological Designing
Food - Shelter - Community
john@eco-living.net
http://eco-living.net

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