Permaculture Information Web

[Chad Knepp <pyg AT galatea.org>]

Marco Stahl writes:
 > Hi Chad,

Hi Marco,

 > http://permaculture.info looks very interesting, but I could not
 > find anything more than a KeyWord search. Not very advanced
 > compared with the http://www.ibiblio.org/pfaf/D_frames.html
 > engine. Maybe I'm wrong???
 >
 > Why don't you expand/improve the pfaf-engine instead of building a
 > own system?

IMO, PIW/Eden is more sophisticated than PFAF in that the keyword
search is able to access all aspects of the database, not just names,
or just text blobs, etc.  It also has a 120+ word controlled
vocabulary, including things like 'pond', 'shade', 'sunny', 'acid',
etc. There also exist several (unused by the client) methods to search
specific portions of the dataset as well.  Customizing the search
interface is an important (and under done) area of development.

Richard Morris, creator of the PFAF engine is also a member of the PIW
project.

 > Are there some more detailed visions about the projects future?

The project is under active development.  Look at
<http://dev.permaculture.info> to see the latest dev version 0.2.0.
What you see runing on <http://permaculture.info/> is actually a very
old version.  Also of interest are various docs at
<http://permaculture.info/wiki/index.php?n=Main.RecentChanges>.

 > Do you need help? I'm a programmer with some database,webfrontend
 > experience and would like to contribute to the project.

Yes.  We have a fairly clear direction for development at this point,
but I would be interested in including other contributions if they
seemed like a net benefit, so there is a wide range of possibilities.
Get the current latest version (0.2.0 two weeks old) from
<http://permaculture.info/code.php> and see what you think.

You should definitely subscribe to the PIW list
<http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/piw>.  We also have a
private list for developers that if you become involved you will
probably want to be on.  Write me again if this is really what you
want.  Release announcements will be posted to both lists.

 > Original I was looking for a GUI offline standalone
 > permaculture-orientated plant database, without the need for
 > mysql/webserver und browser.

Although PIW/Eden will work offline we think the greatest benefit will
come from soliciting user contributions.  The most significant changes
from PFAF involve allowing user edited material.

We are already thinking about not being tied to a web server/browser
front end and already have an xml-rpc server that can handle custom
clients.  As (crude) examples look at the *_to_xml.py scripts that I
wrote to convert various portions of the PFAF dataset to comments with
our internal xml markup.  This is really hackish code with some evil
regular expressions to remove some non-ascii garbage that crept in.

 > If there is no other work to do, maybe I will start such a
 > project. I'm also interested in creating a PDA-Version, something
 > like a free "hitchhikers guide to permaculture" for the pocket.
 > What do you think about this ideas?  Is there more important work
 > to do, where I could help?

Look at dev.permaculture.info, look at the code, play with it.  See if
you are inspired.  Right now, I think the web/html client portions of
the code need the most work (Eden/HTMLClient.py and
Eden/client/*py)... although the server needs better documentation and
a cleaner method of import into Eden/Server.py.  I'm personally much
more attached to what and how things happen with the server.

 > Can you send me the lastest version of eden? Do you have more
 > documentation?

See above.  0.2.1 should be out very soon.

 > muchas gracias y saludos, Marco


Cheers,
Chad

-- 
Chad Knepp
python -c 'import base64;print base64.decodestring("cHlnQGdhbGF0ZWEub3Jn")'