What's new in the worldwide botanical database project

J.M. Vanel

Lots of new items at http://jmvanel.free.fr/ , including a few Diospyros descriptions, actually parsed by FloraParse from the Flora of China, with an enhanced sample User Interface for queries.

Following is an extract from the "What's new" file:

1999-12-29

The Lex-Yacc-C++ parser for classical Floral is ready for release. Let's call it FloraParse. Mail me to get the sources. At last I wrote a list of tasks. See if something is within your competences.

1999-12-18

The Lex-Yacc-C++ parser for classical Flora begins to breathe; it will be released for Christmas under the GNU Public Licence. I looked at the Flora Europeae.

Contacts

Free Software Foundation (www.gnu.org) has sent an encouraging mail

The Filters project is writing conversion routines from proprietary formats to XML-based file formats ==>TODO: ask for information about this project France's Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, at the Arboretum of Chèvreloup Don Kirkup of Kew Gardens is working in the same direction (markup of floristic texts) lots of contributions on the TDWG - Structure of Descriptive Data TDWG-SDD@USOBI.ORG mailing list; an interesting discussion since Mon, 22 Nov 1999 on the Taxonomic Databases Working Group's new discussion list. I (JMV) got a password for the very interesting West Australian Florabase database: http://www.calm.wa.gov.au/science/florabase.html lots of activity on the W3C's mailing lists:www-rdf-interest@w3.org and looked dictionary projects: very promising in that they offer unambiguous semantic for common vocabulary: wordnet@princeton.edu, www.dict.org looked Xdelta (http://www.bath.ac.uk/~ccslrd/delta/index.html) , a direct translation of Delta format in XML; comments: probably better to declare character numbers as ID; characters could be turned into rdf:Property

-- <person> <first_name>Jean-Marc</first_name> <name>Vanel</name> <project>Worlwide Botanical Database - making available botanical data on Internet <a href="http://jmvanel.free.fr/" >site</a> </project> <a href="mailto:jmvanel@free.fr">mail</a> </person>