[Retros] Modification of length records

[andrew buchanan]

Hi Alain,

History suggests that my current labour-intensive model for maintaining my site simply doesn't work.

Thanks for the offer of TeX, but that would still lead to transcription, just like pdf (which I am sure I can copy/paste from). I was hoping that you might have all this data in a database, or at least something like Excel or even XML.

But actually, there's no point setting up a separate database. The primary source of data should be a single database, and any feeds should be as automated as possible. One could use an existing database, e.g. something like the excellent PDB. If that supported an API, I could download the results of a query into my own website. But even that is limited because any comments or changes don't get uploaded automatically back into PDB.

The best way investment of time would be in improving PDB or other databases. PDB supports discussion round individual problems. What it doesn't support is discussion round topics e.g.themes or tournaments. This is a big omission, because it deprives us of a lot of the context round problems, which I have argued before is a big error from an anthropological and historical perspective. How often have you looked at a PDB problem and thought "*Why* did he design it like that? What was he trying to optimize?"

Maybe a combination of a forum and a database is the right model...?

The other thing in PDB is the problem of data quality. More trusted data stewards are required to go round in PDB and sort out the errors, put in tags etc. Maybe we should use Amazon's "Mechanical Turk" haha. But this is something which would be a worthwhile investment of  time, because it's the maintenance of primary data, not duplicated work like transcribing data for my website would be.

Just some random thoughts...

Cheers,
Andy.

----- Original Message ----
From: Alain BROBECKER <abrobecker at yahoo.com>
To: Buchanan <andrew at anselan.com>; retro <retros at janko.at>
Sent: Mon, November 23, 2009 3:48:08 PM
Subject: Re: [Retros] Modification of length records

Hi,


> Hi Alain this is timely. I am redoing my website. But I don't want to spend lots of time transcribing text. I must think of a smart way to do this. All the best Andy 


The .TeX file is available in the following archive:
  http://abrobecker.free.fr/chess/lengths.zip

It's plain text (you can rename it lengths.txt instead of
lengths.tex). It contains all FEN etc...

Hope it helps.

Regards, Alain



Alain Brobecker (abrobecker at yahoo.com) |_  _  _ |_
http://abrobecker.free.fr/             |_)(_|(_|| ) of  Arm's Tech


      
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