Good points.... I was thinking about a single user application. Multi-
user/blogs changes the game entirely and would involve creative work
on defining metadata and on standardizing terms, which would be a
challenge but a rewarding one -- and a large effort. Given how many
tea taste terms are "subjective" and adjectival, I'm cautious about
the practicality of this. It would indeed be useful to get some degree
of structure and standardization of vocabulary. Maybe a company like
Adagio would be receptive to such an initiative from an
entrepreneurial real lover. Its large number of customer reviews are
just free-form comments which very much limits their value.

On Apr 19, 2:51 pm, Lewis Perin > wrote:
> pgwk > writes:
> > [...Microsoft...]
>
> > Whatever solution members of our group adopts shoudl be very
> > simple. Smartphones have a long way to go in terms of display, true
> > compatibility and even data entry. Relastional DBMS would be a
> > complete overkill -- we are not talking about hundreds of thousands
> > of records, with complex query needs and conditional Boolean search
> > features,
>
> Not unless there's more than one user/taster. Do you want to
> foreclose that possibility at the outset?
>
> > plus why would anyone need to normalize the data as tables?
>
> One reason is that you might want to be sure when you're talking about
> the same thing and when you're talking about different things. For a
> concrete example, there's the exchange I had with LurfysMa about
> purchases (or lots) vs. types of tea.
>
> > [...]
>
> > A tea DB is basically just a simple set of records, so all that is
> > needed is a simple data entry mechanism, search capability and
> > display output. The only non-simple issue is coming up with a list
> > of the fields and keys you want to use.
>
> Well, that's one way to do it, and a valid way, but hardly the only
> one. There are lots of free-form blogs featuring people's tasting
> notes out there. I read some of them with pleasure and profit. But I
> fear that a quick-n-dirty "database" for tea tasting would suck all
> the flavorsome virtues out of the blog approach without much
> offsetting usefulness.
>
> /Lew
> ---
> Lew Perin / #c5