Data exchange with SignPuddle Markup Language

[Steve Slevinski]

Hi Jonathan,

The SQL is for MySQL databases.  I'm not sure how many changes would be 
needed for MSSQL.


> When someone has a Personal sign Puddle, their "Not-so-unique" id for 
> entry 7 in user interface puddle number 1 will be "ui.1.7" and 
> probably won't even be the same thing.  Rather a GUID is unique per 
> entry throughout all the records in all the tables of all the 
> databases of the world.  The the same problem would occur for other 
> programs wanting to export data to SignPuddle using SPML.  For more 
> info see. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guid
>
For a more complete unique ID, the creation date stamp could be 
appended.  For merging puddles, I was planning to compare the creation 
date stamp for entires with the same ID.  If the creation date stamp is 
the same, the modification date stamp could be used to determine which 
is the newer edit.  If the creation date stamp is different, then one of 
the entries will need a new id.

I haven't read up on the GUID yet.  I'll take a look.

> How do you plan on implementing the several sign languages all in one 
> puddle????  As each puddle has it's own language? 
The current design for SignPuddle doesn't know anything about 
languages.  It can use sign language or voice language. 

The new design will be language aware.  Each entry can have several 
items.  Each item has a defined language.  The first item could be in 
ASL and the second could be in BSL and the third could be in English.

I think this design will be very useful with specialized dictionaries.  
A Bible centric dictionary for translation would be one such example.


> I see that in the example above you don't have the name tag. Could you 
> explain some more on the difference of the term tag and the text tag 
> please??
>
I renamed the name tag as the term tag.  It felt more natural.

I'm trying to use the same SPML format for both dictionaries and 
literature.  Each entry can have multiple terms but only one text.  For 
dictionaries, the terms would be the individual signs themselves along 
with possible variations.  For dictionaries, the text would be a sign 
language definition for the entry.

For literature, the terms would be a title, while the text would be the 
actual text of the entry.


> I would be a bit of a bummer not to be able to share colors or sizes 
> of symbols between programs.  Especially if you want to send your 
> document to another program to do the layout.
>
With the design of BSW, I tried to separate content from presentation.  
Similar to a straight ascii text file. 

Can you give an example or two of how you think it could work?

Regards,
-Steve