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  • From: Richard Morris <webmaster AT pfaf.org>
  • To: PCPLANTDB <pcplantdb AT lists.ibiblio.org>, Permaculture Information Web <piw AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Cc:
  • Subject: PIW Graphing the Symantic Web
  • Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 08:56:07 +0100

Hi Folks,
My latest wheeze, not sure if its strictly on topic for permaculture.info but here goes.

I've been pondering a graphing program which could pull data off any website and produce graphs and charts.

For example I might wish to create a graph of polulation by countries by pulling data off the CIA world fact website.

To do this there are basically three components

external website - writtend in html (hard) or xml (easy) html-microformat tags (easy).

Scaper programs - these have the responsability for parsing websites
and extracting data from them.

Graphing client - gets data from different scrapers and creates a graph.

There might be a number of different scraper programs.

A standard xml scraper which could use an xslt script to pull elements from an xml document. This could also be used with microformats.

Custom scrapers, tuned for a particular html website. Copes with the indosyncraticies of its format.

Scrapers for other services.


How this relates to piw.

PIW server could be a typical exteran website.
I could write a scraper to parse the site and pull out data.
This would then allow a graphing client to say graph the heights of a selection of trees.

The same tech could also be used for other clients other than graphs.

Other elements, there is a need for a standard format for the output of scraper programs. This would need to be generic rather than subject specific, i.e. no asumptions about field names etc.

Anyway off to school

Rich





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