Re: Universal Astrological Database Format

"Bernard Peek" <bap_at_shrdlu.com> wrote in message news:fqiYD+Ex5lD$EwsP_at_diamond9.demon.co.uk...
> 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.

Absolutely agree. (BTW - I'm one of the posters from AAT that's been working this thread. The basic problem we're having is that the person with the most enthusiasm for getting the job done believes that comma separated text files are the way to go.) ):
>
> 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.

Well, there's not that much to astrological data. For births, you need a date and time (the application needs to handle time zone and time changes, but that's not a data exchange issue, and the astrological community has what may well be the best data bases for this) and a place (in latitude and longitude. Everything else is basically comments.

For events, you basically need another date and time, and a way of relating different people to the event, and also a way of classifying the event (birth, death, marriage, divorce and so forth ad infinitum.)

The trouble isn't the core data; it's the extra analytic information. In fact, one of the standard packages uses XML as it's data format. The only difference I have with it is that I prefer to use attributes, and Halloran prefers to use a separate tag for each elementary piece of data. Since I'm not hugely experianced, I don't really know whether this is just a style difference, or whether there's some more fundamental issues that dictate which way one should go.

> >
> >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.

I wonder how many of them are references to Halloran's product. Interesting question; I'll have to look that one up.
>
> 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
> www.diversebooks.com: SF & Computing book reviews and more.....
>
> In search of cognoscenti
>
Received on Wed Jul 16 2003 - 23:16:11 CEST