[pdb-discuss] Web-app demo running

Thu Aug 9 10:01:39 UTC 2007

Jon Phillips wrote:
> This looks cool! Congrats! Are the public domain rules worked out...
> 
> Ok guys, so, have been working with the team here on pdwiki, and we have
> figured out a change in the project.
> 
> We are looking to make the canadian component of the site a separate
> site that relies upon the service we are developing, called
> wikibiblio...

This sounds great -- exactly the kind of refactoring I think we were 
discussing back at the July meeting.

> It would be great to fold your efforts on the technical site into
> ours...because of this change, I can open up this service component we
> are building, based upon drupal.
> 
> Would you be interested in this?

100%. We could then really focus on our web part just being a front end 
to your service (our current approach was to be a front end to 
musicbrainz but I am increasingly concerned about their lack of 
distinction between a release (an album), a work and a 
performance/recording of that work -- though this something that might 
get fixed by their new ontology).

If I understand what you are suggesting correctly what this would mean is:

1. All data get stored in wikibiblio.

2. Other projects pull out that data to do specific stuff (such as list 
the public domain recordings for their jurisdiction -- this is what our 
front-end would do) and point people back to wikibiblio if they want to 
make an edit.

This seems like a great approach to me. Stuff we could do to help:

1. Write a python wrapper around whatever web api or data dump format 
you give out from wikibiblio (we'd use this to pull data from you -- and 
perhaps also to write data if that were supported). I'd be happy to 
start on this right away.

2. Write code to dump whatever data we have into wikibiblio (again just 
needs details of the upload API or dump format you require).

3. Continue writing out front-end for EU public domain stuff. This would 
not only show-off the benefits of this componentized approach but would 
no doubt help find bugs etc.

Let me know if I have understood this correct and, if so I'll get 
involved with the web api stuff so I can start coding up a python wrapper :)

~rufus