Link DB & Questions

From: earth (earth@hyperreal.org)
Date: Sat Aug 05 2000 - 12:54:48 PDT


Looking at:

http://bootstrap.org:8080/OHS/Architecture%20Diagram

I thought I'd try to look at the Link Database chunk. Here's my attempt
at defining it and questions that came out of it.

OHS Email Gateway V1

--
Link Database:
--
Current Purpose:  A database and supporting API which takes incoming
documents, checks them for links to other documents and inserts
any found links into a database in order to enable 'back link' maps,
trees, or diagrams.

Future Purpose: Add script ability to mine existing HTML / XML document systems to create back-link databases.

Other Purposes for V1: ?

Function:

1) Incoming documents checked for links to other documents within a specified URL context.

1a) URL Context / Domain specified in a configuration file or defaults to all links within the server's IP/domain.

2) All links to valid URLs are added to the Link Database, one link per record.

2a) Each DB Record consists of LinkURL and DocumentURL where each DocumentURL is defined as the document (in this case email) that contains the links. This would probably consist of numeric IDs which index into a table of actual URLs.

3) Database API includes functions for requesting a list of links which point to any given URL and for requesting the list of links within any given document. This API will be used initially by the "XML to Views" puzzle piece.

4) Other functions for V1?

Questions:

1) I wondered at the last meeting and then again when i was thinking of this what the plan is for whether to require a database server for all installations or whether the plan was to -not- require a database server for any installation? One way to go is to require a db server but to write a series of bridges for different SQL servers .. pick a couple initial customers and make the system work for them with the idea of writing a generic enough interface to allow for more. I use mySQL on many projects, but oracle and microsoft SQL seem like obvious candidates.

OR does this system need to include whatever DB its going to use within the package itself? (simplifying the installation in many cases, but weighing the system down).

This question also comes up with the "XML Database" piece and it seems likely that the two would both happily use the same solution.

What are the current thoughts on this?

let me know if this is at all useful.

bcl



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Tue Aug 21 2001 - 17:57:48 PDT