On Fri, Oct 24, 2003 at 12:01:05AM +0100, Kate L Pugh wrote:
On Wed 22 Oct 2003, David Cantrell david@cantrell.org.uk wrote:
Such a project would require that the main Openguides project can supply data, with a nice stable structure.
This won't be a problem. All the data is in a database on which I've done some pretty screwy queries and always been able to get out what I wanted. Yes, I am a SQL-loving freak, but I'm an SQL-loving freak that will make your database extracts for you.
I was mostly concerned with the database structure being stable so that we^Wyou don't have to rewrite screwy queries every week. And of course I don't want to be relying on a particular field existing only to find that it disappears or gets renamed or sumfink.
It also requires that Openguides people decide what functionality is important for such a tool and what isn't.
"Show me things of type [foo] near where I am" is a must. There's no point in having it portable otherwise.
Which gets us to the postcode problem again. "I'm in WC1 what else is?" would work, especially if we can hardcode each postal area's neighbours somewhere.
Things we can do without include full-text searching, showing wanted pages, editing pages, showing pictures.
Oh yes, pictures are hard, listing wanted pages is pointless if you can't edit and I don't propose writing a conduit to submit handheld edits back to the site, and full-text searching, while possible, is not, I imagine, particularly useful.
So, we want to: search by location and category - do we have enough data to use locales? search by name (how fuzzy should this search be?) show list of matching nodes show content of a node should we truncate long nodes? we'll lose funky formatting too.
Possible funky features from easiest to pain in the bum: expose data to the built-in search facility support memory cards add this place to my address book export node to memopad beam this node as a memopad record beam this app and the database use a GPS find this place in Citymaps phone this place #include <wishlist_as_long_as_my_arm>