Permaculture Information Web

[Richard Morris <webmaster AT pfaf.org>]

It seems like a formal spec is fast becoming a priority.

I'm not sure if an XML DTD is the right way to approach this. Mainly 
because its hard to understand for lay people.

A post by Heidi on piw suggested a way that we might proceed.

> Then really what remains to be decided is
> - what criteria we want to report
> - how we want to label them
> - how we want to report them (plain text etc.)
> - how we want to search them

A few questions like this, suitably broken down, could start the 
process. Then we can find solutions to these questions and if necessary
break the questions down. Once we are there we can translate to a 
database schema or XML DTD.

I'm also thinking that the bug tracker could be used to focus our 
decision making. I've not had a look at the specific software John S+H 
are investigating, but if its like bugzilla we have some useful features
1) Ability to prioritise tasks
2) A means to assign tasks to people.

Task no 1 could be "produce formal spec."

Task 2: Devlope key questions.
Heidi has nicely identified some

Q2 - what criteria do we want to report?
Q3 - how do we lable them?
Q4 - how do we report them?
Q5 - how do we search them?

I'd also add:

Q1 - what objects do we want to record data about?
        (not necessarily just plants, also have cultivars,
        families & higher order taxa, locales etc.)
Q6 - what user input is allowed?

We have covered a lot of these questions in an informal manner
but it is imperitive that we start to converge on some answers.

I think we should start with Q2 for plants for now.
I'll post a separate post with the answers to some of these.

Rich

p.s. nice one Heidi for a good breakdown.