Universal Astrological Database Format

I'm not asking you guys to comment on your or our beliefs about astrology. Simply stated, we need some advise.

The situation is this….
Some of us in the astrological community would like to develop a universal file format for storing data. Currently there is no ‘database' standard. There is a European file storage standard that is popular but it doesn't have a way to relate charts to one another. All the major Astrological software developers have their own file format and none of them really are designed to do relational analysis. We would like to build an open standard that would lend itself to research.

I have some knowledge of MS Access and think that a relational database is the way to go. The problem is limited access to software among our group. We don't all have MS Access, or even a Windows OS for that matter. The programmers among our group are doing stuff in Linux, UNIX, Windows, and Mac using languages like Perl, Python, C++, to Visual Basic. There are also web-based applications, one of the best, see www.astro.com

I have been looking at btrieve and adabas. They seem to be compatible with a wide verity of operating systems and programming languages. I'm still confused about what they cost though. What can ya'll (I'm Texan) tell me about these or other databases.

If you are still with me I'll dive a little deeper. There are three major types of horoscope charts.
1.Personal – Height, hair color, occupation, personality traits, etc…

2.Relationships – Husband/wife, victim/perpetrator, doctor/patient, etc…
Each person can have a multitude of relationships such as a family tree.
Take a plane crash for example. Not only is each victim linked to each other, but are also linked to the mechanic who worked on the plane, the air traffic controller, etc… they can even be linked to a chart for the day the airline was incorporated

3.Event – Car wreck, lottery win, broken leg, marriage, pregnancy, etc…

I don't want to get too much into details now. Mainly exploring various database options.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Received on Thu Jul 10 2003 - 23:29:55 CEST