{"id":82,"date":"2017-04-14T15:29:55","date_gmt":"2017-04-14T15:29:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/opensourcebees.org\/?p=82"},"modified":"2017-04-14T15:29:55","modified_gmt":"2017-04-14T15:29:55","slug":"beexmlorg-launched","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/opensourcebees.org\/?p=82&lang=en","title":{"rendered":"beeXMLorg launched"},"content":{"rendered":"

Governmental institutions, academic research projects as well as breeding programs of beekeeping associations inevitable gather data about bees and beekeepers. Unfortunately these databases become data islands and the information is of limited value for the beekeeping community as a whole.<\/p>\n

beeXML is intended to be the answer to this problem.<\/p>\n

The project is not about creating a central database. Rather, XML is a self-describing data format that can allow the exchange of data.<\/p>\n

In order to create an XML standard, it is necessary to agree on what data is collected on a particular topic. The self-describing structure makes the exchange much more flexible than it would be with rigid table definitions.<\/p>\n

In addition, there are countless development environments for ready-made software libraries to read and write XML.<\/p>\n

Once we\u00a0have a standard for a particular subject matter, the existing databases can be provided with XML interfaces.<\/p>\n

This in turn would later allow a meta database, where\u00a0it will be possible to\u00a0query all connected databases via a common interface.<\/p>\n

First, our task is\u00a0to take an inventory\u00a0as many existing databases as possible ( see Other Projects and Databases<\/a>\u00a0on the beeXML.org web site) . Then ask the operators of the databases for their table definitions. This will allow use\u00a0to\u00a0generalize\u00a0the similarities to an XML standard.<\/p>\n

There are different data domains:<\/p>\n