Hawkwind Codex database?

[M Holmes]

Paul Mather writes:

> Jill & Mike,
>
> I was wondering about how the Hawkwind Codex is prepared.  Is the
> formatted version produced from some kind of database, or is new material
> simply edited into place in the extant codex (which would account for the
> minor discrepancies in format)?

Yep, we just edit the text in.

> Last week or so I was messing around a little, and I whipped up a crude
> awk script that would process the codex into records of the form
> @track name@, at version@, at studio/live@, at album name@, which I was then able
> to import successfully into MS-Access.  (I may actually revise this, to
> output two files---one of track-ID + track details, and another of album
> name + track-IDs.)  Alas, the simple nature of the script meant it didn't
> get everything in the codex.  For one, it did not process the notes
> associated with each track.  It also did not get the cross-references.
> But I guess the 2% or so it didn't manage could be edited in by hand.
> (And the track notes could be added manually, too, unless I fancy writing
> a fancier awk script, which isn't likely.:)

If you do get it complete with notes into Access, I'd appreciate a copy
of the file.

> Right now I am messing around with interfacing information storage and
> retrieval systems with the WWW.  (I already have a [non WWW-accessible]
> full-text ISR system indexing the Hawkwind lyrics file, which [again, with
> the aid of an awk script] I split up into individual lyrics files, one
> song per document.  Both boolean and ranked queries are supported.)
> Next, I am interested in setting up a WWW interface to an mSQL database,
> maybe one containing the codex or discography information (or
> both)---hence the interest in finding out whether such information
> already exists in database form; it would be easier to import such
> information into, e.g. mSQL, than to create the database myself (via awk,
> etc.).

I figure what would be *really* neat would be to start a massive
hypertext WWW document which would list the codex and allow each track
to be clicked on to access either its codex entry, or where present its
lyric file (password protected to keep the lawyers happy).

That could form as a basis for adding in the writers of the track and
linking that to biographical data, solo albums etc.

Ultimately the family tree could be linked to this and the albums and
giglists indexed by lineup.

It's megalomania of course but it'd be great to start such a project and
just add to it as we went. Sonique seems to be good at this sort of
stuff.

I'll copy this to the list just in case we have enough volunteers to
make a start on such a project. I guess if we had enough people we could
agree a specification and share out the effort...

> Paul.

FoFP