I still want to investigate the issues with differing calendrical systems and perhaps some sort of AJAXy geographic solution. In the past few days, I finished reworking a project that I’d been working on earlier this year when I talked to you last, namely a more ‘human-friendly-URI-and-search’ for the Geonames database, focusing more on (current) cities and administrative divisions. (You can see it at http://www.pipian.com/rdf/places/) and some sort of combination of this with user-built historical subdivision data might be useful (if difficult).

One of the other things I want to do (or at least to see) is work on some autonomous agents that fit into the DFT ‘network’, given the incomplete nature of hosting the files for external users, so some sort of automated ’search’ or ‘request’ service independent of the program itself might be useful to ’scrape’ potential matches while the user is busy doing things other than genealogical research…

I haven’t ever gotten a chance to play around with the UI much either, but I’ll give playing around with that a shot too.

Oh, and I use a Mac, so I might be able to provide at least a few patches if you’re interested to make it more ‘Cocoa’-friendly out of the box.

The Locationary you’ve put together looks really great! The ability to have more than just a textual place name is invaluable. Particulary having the geo coordinates, which of course make distance measures and interactive maps possible.

When you mention independent search or request services, do you mean a web application, another program, or something else? I love the concept and thought that perhaps minimizing Genesis to the system tray (in Windows, I’m not sure what the same mechanism is called on Mac) and letting it run agents in the background might fill that need. On the other hand, a web application that does that might be really neat. You could think of it as a sort of feed aggregator. I think I’d use SPARQL/SPARUL for transferring results into Genesis.

And as for Mac, yes, I’d love to make it more ‘Cocoa’-friendly. I’d really like to be doing builds for other operating systems than Windows. I haven’t been able to get them to automatically build properly on Windows though. Problems with the file system, I think.

Now, also, I know that SWT isn’t necessarily OS X friendly, but I seem to be having some problems building the system. It’s bugging out about needing org.apache.xalan as well as not being able to resolve some org.eclipse.swt classes. I must admit I’ve not used Eclipse before either.

As for building on OS X, of course I’ve never done it, but if you want to e-mail me the output that you’re seeing I might be able to help resolve it. The build process is really tricky :(.