Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

One thing always leads to another … and new ideas.

One of the e-newsletters I subscribe to is the Pascal Newsletter which always has great articles and ideas for Delphi programmers. It has been a year since their last issue, and it’s nice that they’ve started it up again.

This issue had a link to an article that really caught my attention: XML Topic Maps - by Craig Murphy, which discusses how XML topic maps provide a mechanism to intelligently classify information, and how to implement topic maps in your apps. That article then links to The Tao of Topic Maps, which is subtitled: “Finding the Way in the Age of Infoglut”.

Now I’ve followed all the different attempts to make GEDCOM more useful, to include assertions, assumptions, evidence and proofs. Many of these also change GEDCOM to an XML base. They include the LDS GEDCOM Standard Future Direction (1998), the LDS GEDCOM XML 6.0 (2001, 2002), CommSoft’s Event GEDCOM (1994), GENTECH’s Genealogical Data Model (2000), Tom Wetmore’s DeadEnds Data Model (2000), Terry Fitzpatrick’s GeniML (2002) and his Transcription Notation (2004), and several other sources as well. All were attempts by Genealogists to add reasoning into Genealogy data. None ever took hold, and I doubt if there will ever be agreement as to which way is the best.

But this idea of Topic Maps may provide a link betwen them all. It was not developed for Genealogy, but it was developed to enhance indexing. It is a metadata describing the data. Lot’s of possibilites here.

The other neat thing about Topic Maps is that it is an XML solution. The only XML solution that has even started to take hold (after Microsoft’s two year attempt to get people to use XML) seems to be RSS/Atom Newsfeeds and their XML implementation. Topic Maps have the possibility of being the next big thing in XML.

As for Behold, I do hope to include the capability to read and write all the various flavors of XML with all their enhancements. I’ve made Behold general enough to handle any construct from any form of GEDCOM or GEDCOM-related XML’s, so it is not out of the question. Right now there is no demand for this, but somehow some new technologies seem to catch on - just because they’re new. So we’ll have to see.

For now my spam problems are over. Preliminary to the improvements my webhost is making to provide enhanced spam filtering, they requested that all users turn off their “Nobody Alias”. This feature, when active, accepts all emails addressed to the domain and delivers them to the administrator’s email address - even if the email box doesn’t exist.

I had this turned on, and I had it turned on on purpose. I didn’t want to miss anyone e-mailing me about Behold who might have spelled the first part of my e-mail address wrong, e.g. xxxxx@lkessler.com. I was willing to put up with the (currently up to) 2000 spam a day that come that way, just so I wouldn’t miss the one that really was meant for me.

But Myhosting asks I turn it off until they are ready to introduce their newly designed email system. So I shall, and I’ll have to put up with only a measley 50 spam a day for now. Oh horrors.

The August 2004 issue of PC World listed FeedReader in their “Best Free Software” article. It is another free News Aggregator software like SharpReader with a difference: it is Open Source. What really surprised me when I checked out their site was that it was written in Delphi.

Now this peaked my interest. I downloaded it and found it to be fast-opening, something SharpReader is not. It seemed to lack a few things that I’m sure will be added over time, such as dragging and dropping the XML icon from a webpage to add a feed.

I always like to browse the code of Delphi Open Source programs for ideas and techniques that I might be able to apply to Behold. I knew, however, that FeedReader would be using Delphi 7 or later, since that was when XML was built into the Delphi language. I’m still using Delphi 4, so I can’t use any of the new built in stuff yet.

I’m not going to be upgrading my copy of Delphi at least until I release version 1. I’m too familiar with the effects of doing so in the middle of development. Too many things stop working. It’s best to get a stable version first.