Re: Universal Astrological Database Format

In message <45878464.0307101329.6f56a8c8_at_posting.google.com>, Bill Kneuper <b_kneuper_at_hotmail.com> writes
>Hello All,
>
>There is a discussion going on over at 'alt.astrology.moderated' about
>'Universal data file needed for astrologers'
>
>I'm not asking you guys to comment on your or our beliefs about
>astrology. Simply stated, we need some advise.

OK.

>
>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.

What you really need is a standard method of exchanging data and metadata, that is the logical relationships between the items of data. It's the metadata that turns a pile of data into usable information.

The obvious system for doing this is XML. This is what it was designed for. It records data and metadata and is platform independent. There are programs to handle XLM with PCs, Macs and UNIX systems. Many of those tools are free.

The big advantage of XML is that once someone has defined the format of the data, and published it, everyone can check their data structures against a published standard. The disadvantage is that someone needs to do a lot of work to define and publish the standard.

>
>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

You can manipulate XML with all of those languages, and a lot of recent web browsers can read it too. If you really have to you can build XML files with a plain text editor.

>
>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.

Those are standards for storing data and metadata in files. You could use them but XML seems a better way to go. Start out by looking at www.xml.org or find a book on XML. There are about a quadrillion web pages on the subject too. Searching for pages that include XML and astrology gets 12,800 hits.

Whatever format you choose you need to start out by defining the structure of the metadata. The traditional tool for that is the Entity Relationship Diagram, usually abbreviated to ERD. To a first approximation an entity equates to a single table in a database.

I think that's enough to get you started.

-- 
Bernard Peek
bap_at_shrdlu.com
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