collecting building info.

[Seth Teller <seth@graphics.lcs.mit.edu>]

bmg guys,

i won't be there today but just wanted to suggest at least
one discussion item.

it's clear from recent email from greg knight that they 
have useful data which we currently can't "easily" get to.
so i'd like you to A) find out more about that data, by
decoding the spreadsheets that GK is sending, and visiting
him as necessary; and B) propose a reasonable web encoding
of the data, including canonical URLs.  for example, you
might choose to encode each building info file as

   http:// ... ... /bldgnum/bldginfo.txt

where a building info file contains (as you've already 
sketched out, andreas) the building's state plane origin, 
orientation, number of floors, elevation per floor, texture
swatch, etc. etc.

also as we've discussed, once you get all of these files
working at our end (with failed fetches to DOF, followed
by successful fetches to our server), we can transfer all
of it to DOF, and they can maintain it in the future.  of
course this means we have to coordinate with DOF on the
format and semantics of these files.  moreover, we should
make the info files generate themselves automatically from
the data that DOF already maintains internally, to the 
extent possible.

finally, all of this stuff should be clearly and visibly 
documented so that if and when they do want to add a building 
or a floor (or correct some data that's already there), DOF 
will know how to do it.

seth.