Platonides wrote:
It's not available in the database yet, but that's something we're looking at doing. If anyone else has a particular reason to need this data, it would help if they could describe it, so we can decide how to format the data, and how detailed it needs to be.
It seems that many people have been working with this data in completely independent way; Erik Zachte has a set of scripts to reformat it (which I have used), but several other people have developed their own tools. It'd be nice to have a common format (better that the current "raw" data).
Rather than a common format, I think there should be a common api. Then it would store i on whatever format makes it most efficient. We might agree on a common xml-based format which could be accessed on hundreds of languages... and be completely useless.
Common API would be nice, but that means having a service able to provide the data. At the moment, it is already quite difficult for people to access the files containing the raw data -- well, it is not *so* difficult, but there is no central location containing all the data, and the files are cumbersome to read and process (as already mentioned here).
So in the short run, we need an easy way to provide access to the data files. Anything above that will be icing on the cake.
Frédéric