[MacPerl] OT - Taxy: An Open-Source Database Project

[Brian McNett <brianmc@telebyte.net>]

This is clearly off-topic, so I'll keep it short.

Some time ago, I posted a question about prototyping GUIs in MacPerl.  I 
mentioned at the time that I was working on a project that I was not at 
liberty to discuss.

Well, not only do I now have liberty to discuss the project, but the 
success of the project depends on my blabbing my head off about it.

Taxy is not intended to be a traditional database.  At the highest level, 
Taxy is a software project intended to provide useful tools for 
identifying organisms. The initial area of focus for the project is 
mushrooms. The project includes a database of fungal descriptions and an 
engine designed to let the user quickly sift through those descriptions 
to arrive at an accurate choice based on a mushroom they have collected. 
Once a description has been selected the user can access a complete 
description of the mushroom as well as notes that other users have 
entered about that description. As the application matures, the focus can 
be expanded to include all fungi and not just macromycetes.  85% to 90% 
of all fungi have never been cataloged or described (It's a very big job).

Nathan Wilson, Taxy's principle author is currently revising the core 
code, which will be released shortly.  We've set up a mailing list 
<taxy@mycoinfo.com>, to facilitate discussion and information exchange 
between people involved in the project. Please subscribe by sending a 
message to <taxy-request@mycoinfo.com> with the word "subscribe" in the 
subject line. We need people with cross-platform skills.  There will be 
Unix, MacOS, and Windows version, all based around the common core code.  
I personally anticipate a need for C/C++ , Perl, and Java programmers.  
There's been some talk between Nathan and I about a subset of Taxy on 
Palm Pilot.

<http://www.mycoinfo.com/taxy/>

Thanks.

--Brian

# Fungal Parataxonomy                   Mycology Information (Mycoinfo)
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