DOKK. The goal is to build a big graph about everything. It’s a database, about everything. Currently working on my own because nobody else has showed interest, but I’d love to work on it with other people. The main project is the graph itself, but I’ve also built the website as a more friendly way for people to use the data. I hope in the future that the data will be used by other projects/people too. The website is used by approximately 100 users/day.

I looked at your repos. I was curious as it wasn’t hosted on notabug. Is anything going on with freepost’s codebase?

“anything going on” in what sense?

Any features or development plans. I had thought about contributing to it since it was written in python and looked simple enough.

ok ok I see. The source code is linked at the bottom of the page. There are 2 branches in the repository, master and communities. The latter is the most recent. I branched when I added communities to the website, but never merged back to master.

Just out of curiosity… would you be interested in helping with dokk instead of freepost?

I don’t have a clear idea of what dokk does. (A databse of everything = digital encyclopedia? Web visualization?) I’ve also had an interest in simple message board systems which is why I was looking at freepost.

I don’t have a clear idea of what dokk does. (A databse of everything = digital encyclopedia? Web visualization?) I’ve also had an interest in simple message board systems which is why I was looking at freepost.

Can I ask you what is not clear about dokk? I’m genuinely interested about this, because I’ve heard this argument a lot and it’s honestly so confusing to me why people react this way… but it might be the reason why other people are not interested in the project.

So, I started dokk with the idea of making a free database. A database is a collection of organized data, and its purpose is to make information easily accessible. Say for instance you wanted to use a dataset of books or movies in your projects, you could use dokk. Data is collected/imported from external primary sources, and organized into the database. Technically, it’s a graph because it’s the most flexible data structure that would allow me to organize this “graph about everything”. Nodes represent “things” and edges represent relationships. This structure is more flexible than organizing everything into tables, that’s why I went this route. I’ve considered using relations (tables) but ultimately it would be more work that way. The problem that I’m trying to solve with this project is that public datasets are either proprietary (non-free data), or if they are freely licensed they are often artificially restricted (for example paywalls, access restrictions such as paying a premium for full access, collecting people personal information such as emails before granting access, some scientific journals publish Creative Commons papers but the only way to access it is through their website, etc). So the point is to make the database freely available without all these artificial restrictions. Datasets that are free and do not have such artificial restrictions, they are however developed in silos, ie. they are not linked to other datasets (exceptions apply as always, of course). So, this big graph aims at addressing this too, because you could start by querying data of a book, then discover information about its authors, then discover information about geographic places linked to authors, etc; all data coming from different sources, but organized together. The website is really just auxiliary to the graph. Because people weren’t interested in the graph, I put together the website as a sort of demonstration I guess. But in the long run I hope more people will be interested in the graph and use it to build more projects around it.

Does any of this make sense to you? Is it still unclear?

What do you r users use it for? Something like CCSearch (Creative Commons Search?

I’ve been growing the database with books, documents, documentation, manpages, because I’m working on it alone and that’s what interests me. So that’s the data that is available so far, and that’s what people use it for; for reading.

As for me I finished up my guestbook script.

https://notabug.org/scuti/emlgb

I had my mind wander into the topic of finance. So I have an amortization schedule generator that I’m thinking about adding graph generation to.

https://notabug.org/scuti/amort

And a prototype of a stock market price watcher. Considering there are so many out there, I’m probably going to make something quirky/weird as opposed to pragmatic.

https://notabug.org/scuti/00-mktdata

(Notabug is having an issue again just as I’m typing this.)