[wsfii-discuss] (free)networking the world

Tue Dec 20 22:29:52 UTC 2005

Often within the local groups at guifi.net, we discuss about which is 
the best app for having certain functionality. Same discussion raises 
even when developing own code.
The problem is that each app has its own database schema for doing his job.
The result of this is that the network vision becomes limited by what's 
in the every single server instead of the network itself.

On the other hand, even when using the same app, in order to distribute 
the servers, will be nice to be able to exchange data between them, and 
therefore the system load in certain apps such as network monitoring 
etc, in a way that a node can manage a specific region, but keeping the 
ability to refresh the data managed by other servers.

To enable this, we're thinking on describing a DTD, which has to be 
neutral from the point of view of the apps.
You can see an a preliminar draft of it here:
http://guifi.net/ca/node/3521 (in Catalan, but the dtd self explains).

In a summary, by having this I do see important advantages:
-Ability to provide a view of a global network consolidating the 
communities who agree in adopting this format.
-Will enable the apps to inter operate between them, so i.e. by having a 
good mapping app, that will not exclude to pick another app for other 
functions, i.e. monitoring tools etc, as long as both tools supports the 
DTD, which has to be simple since is just XML.
-Easy way to provide a global vision of the networks regardless of how 
many local groups there are, therefore that might help to create 
identity/brand name for the freenetworks, without affecting everyone's 
autonomy.

I would expect that we can have something with live data and running at 
guifi.net soon.

Just wondering if someone wants to comment/suggest on this, have more 
ideas or even worked in something similar before (so it's already done 
and we just have to adopt/enhance it).

Ramon