Email to Database Application

Wrong Side of the Divide

Sydney, Australia

Earl Mardle
earl.mardle@kn.com.au

 

Description

An application that enables someone with a very slow connection to interact with a database via email only.

Email is still the most effective and efficient tool of the internet and for many it is the only really affordable one. This is especially important for developing communities.

Email based database access services would allow those with constrained connections to gain from a website all the benefits that those with good web access have. Such tools would be extremely valuable to the whole developing world in its attempt to gain the advantages of ICT. For example:

Enable users (a la Kabissa) to query a database and retrieve search results by email. This may invole downloading a web page with a small java apllication that can convert search terms into an encoded email that interacts with the site search engine. The results are then returned as an email attachment that opens in the local web page.

When a user clicks on the links to the desired documents the java engine creates new emails that fetch the documents in the next cycle.

The proposal could be a development of Kabissa which is Open Source.

Code in the search results email enables the recipient to reply and request the server to send the document or documents listed.

Links in newsletters and alerts generated by the site should operate the same way.

If the tool also interacted with a full web search engine (not just the local database) and cached the results as Furl does (http://www.furl.net) both speed and reliability could be enahnced.

The objective would be to have the web end operate fast enough that the results could be returned with the same email session that sends them. ie, by the time the emails have been sent and new ones downlloaded, they would already include the responses to the requests sent in the first part of the process.

An enhancement would be to enable threaded interactions with a discussion group
46) After joining a discussion group a member can receive postings as an email with hotlinks and, in replying to specific threads, have their comments added to the group in the appropriate place.

Expectations

Nothing special related to this project.

What proposer can provide for Evergreen

Usability testing, advise and new ideas.

Reasons to collaborate

Their status as students is not specially important to me, we are all students of something till the day we die. As people with technology skills however, they will be aiming to do something valuable and it may help raise their awareness of the realities of lives among the vast majority of the world's people in having to deal with that.

The long term benefits of that realisation are important to all our futures.