I've put together a project sumbission for sourceforge and if accepted I intend to upload a copy of my current propoal document. Any advice, suggestions, or feedback from Humbug members or other readers of this blog are welcome. It's that feedback I hope a sourceforge presence will elicit.
The project name I've chosen for now is TransactionSafe. It keeps a focus on the practical outcomes I want from this project in terms of a better personal accounting system. It perhaps detracts a little from my grander schemes of univeral data access, but I think I need to remain focused on the single task if anything greater is going to happen anyway.
The proposal document I have is in openoffice format (which is a package I personally feel stinks like the goats, but few free alternatives exist for what I'm trying to do). I have two revisions which roughly correspond to two weekends' musings that can be found at TransactionSafe_Proposal,1.1A.sxw, and TransactionSafe_Proposal,1.1B.sxw respectively. I haven't done much this weekend except a marginal amount of cleanup on the 1.1B version.
The first revision walks a fairly naieve road and tries to essentially reinvent the wheel wherever possible. 1.1B is my first attempt to map my thinking to available technologies and at least attempts to use an rdf schema to describe the data model. I'm not sure that the rdfs is actually correct, as I haven't actively investigated any validation tool alternatives.
I've laid out much of my technical and philisophical thinking in the document and hopefully it is scrubbed up enough that it won't get too many derisive giggles. There are a couple of inconsistencies already emerging with 1.1B retaining the 1.1A section on lots but not actually including them into its data model (I'm still thinking about how best to implement them). I also expect changes to the data model with the addition of things like account types (is it an asset or a liability, for example?) and the obligitory challenges as to what should be left to the chart of accounts if required and what should be dealt with explicitly by the data model. I may also go back to some existing accounting data model definitions to see if I can straighten out some terms and make them more consistent in my own model (xbrl-gl is an obvious source of material for comparision).
I'm hoping that another side-effect of sourceforge exposure will be that I'm pushed to actually producing something concrete (however insignificant) at least once every couple of weekends to get into the swing of this thing. I'm far too prone to dropping things I get bored of if they're not over quickly, and I don't want this itch to go unscratched.