May be you should consider building an ontology with your data base. This links will provides ideas to explore this avenue: http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm/papers/ontology-tutorial-noy-mcguinness-abstract.html Raoul
David Blomstrom <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: I've been gathering data for an animal kingdom database for quite some time and am now trying to figure out how to organize and display it. So far, I have a table that lists every order, suborder, family, subfamily, genus and species of mammal in a child-parent relationship, like this: NAME | PARENT Carnivora | Mammalia Canidae | Carnivora Canis | Canidae lupus (the wolf) | Canis I also broke that table into separate tables listing only orders, families, genera, species, etc., which I can then display via joins. I haven't yet figured out which methid is going to work best. I think I'd like to make a content management system, possibly modeled after Wikipedia, though I'm also looking at the Tree of Life website at http://tolweb.org/tree/phylogeny.html They use a recursive array technique called Edge Representation, which is discussed about halfway down this page: http://www.phyloinformatics.org/pdf/7.pdf Another possible guide is the Animal Diversity Web - http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/about/technology/index.html - which uses something called Mousetrap and TaxonDB. This is all new and very confusing to me. Making things even more confusing, I read that XML can be used in lieu of databases, and at least one reference seems to suggest that it's the superior choice. So, before I get in any deeper, I'd like to ask about the differences between XML and MySQL. What are the pros and cons, and which would be better for an animal kingdom database? Or could I use both at the same time? I'm new to XML, too, but it looks like it might not be too complex. But it's hard to envision how this all fits together. Thanks. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
