What's new in the worldwide botanical database project

[Jean-Marc Vanel]

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 at 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 at w3.org and
    looked dictionary projects: very promising in that they offer
unambiguous semantic for common vocabulary:
          wordnet at 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 at free.fr">mail</a>
</person>