My "life automation" system Liam (which includes home automation)

[tahl]

I had a request to post the monograph of my system Liam. So here it is. Some notes:

1) It is waaayyy long, clocking in at 30 pages.
2) It does repeat some material as the system is described in 3 "views"
3) I'm sure it needs editing!
4) System has already changed -- after all that was two months ago!
5) Hope to give Homeseer a more prominent position in the future but...
6) ...I hope I can convince Homeseer to make some needed enhancements.
7) Questions and comments welcomed!

Tahl

[S-F]

How do you store and interface with all of this data?

[tahl]

How do you store and interface with all of this data?

You'll probably need to narrow / clarify the question since I could easily spend 10 pages or more. If your questions are,

"how is LifeChronicle stored and how is it retrieved?"

Since Chron has existed for decades and will need to exist for decades more, the principle is to store everything in as simple and universal a format as possible. Otherwise, I would need to migrate every few years. That means that all text is stored as ANSI flatfiles (not even UTF) and a few other formats are supported for rich data such as JPG, PNG, MP3, MP4, PDF, and a few more. All files are supported with indexes for database-like access.

I have several libraries for retrieving the data. The most common functions are for retrieving the data by date (date range) and/or by category. These functions are used by webpages, scripts, etc. The functions return individual items or counts. There are canonical categories (fixed if you will), ad-hoc, people (e.g., @Hunter), places (e.g., +Home), significance (e.g., !2).

For example, to get a list of the most important things that have happened in my life, a simple query "!1" is all that is needed. "!" is the prefix for significance and 1 is the highest level.

Hopefully that answered....