[wsfii-discuss] Fwd: [isf-vol] Fwd: [wirelesstoronto-discuss] [Fwd: Re: [Locative] Micro London]

[Jo Walsh]

hello, sorry to have been late to this discussion, +1 re the
geowiki/local wireless/spatially caching aggregation thing. 

i've admired the stuff i've seen developed *around* tikiwiki - the
mapserver interface, the openmoney.org currency multi-currency plugin. 
i've seen some really nice work based on drupal in the same way.
i've never looked at tikiwiki's source but have spent a little bit up
to the elbows in drupal and it was not very enjoyable. 

i've found an approach of tiny, RESTful web services which do one
thing reasonably well - a unix tools sort of approach, just a URL
scheme nothing fancy - to be working out well, for things like map
services, geocoding, and that delegation to sites like openguides.org
and evnt.org which do specific things well, relieves us of
responsbility (and the content can be re-collected via RSS or again
via URL based interfaces).
  
On Fri, Jun 24, 2005 at 04:33:14AM -0300, Marc Laporte wrote:
> I agree the ideal is to have data which can be plugged and used 
> everywhere. "make it easy for people to plug their own stuff into it, 
> and adapt their set of tools, rather than encourage them to use the same 
> ones."
> 
> I recently saw this initiative. It looks very good:
> http://microformats.org/

I am too much of a semantic web geek to find this very appealing; it
seems like as i write more software involving little tools that spit
out RDF graphs mostly via HTTP, every time i have to write less code,
and one more 40-line function becomes "get the stuff at this URL and
add it to my model."

Anyway we have generic RDF/RSS/etc handling capacities which underly
our interface, as does ISF's auth server increasingly, that was always
what troubled me about using Drupal for this, that its RSS store is
very much distinct from its main node store. 

Please do lets keep in synch though as we seem to be heading to a
similar place; you're perhaps somewhere between us and
espians/plex/24weeks ... the wsfii-dev list was set up to provide a
place to share communication about this sort of thing particularly
with regards to freenetworks...

sorry for the short and nonfully justified rant i have to go out, just
wanted to quickly register interest/enthusiasm.


-jo