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====Forage Mark-Up Language====

With all these edible city/urban forage projects mushrooming all over the place, as the latest fad for artists, environmentalists and culinary type, I notice a certain perpeptual reinvention of the wheel. All that data on where to find edible foodstuffs is locked-up in different formats usable only for that specific project. A little active consideration on how to make this data sharable would do us all good. Perhaps, instead of kickstarting the same thing thousand times for a thousand little projects the edible city community could bootstrap itself into a worldwide network able to create data beyond today and beyond the local. 

What we need is a uniform way of storing data that could be easily translated to others formats (KML/google map applications especially). I hear people talk about recording where what species can be found, adding to this layers  of information like the most likely time to harvest, what parts can be used and what parts not, recipes, medical uses, but also known problems with pollution and/or ownership in a given erea.

Something like this maybe already exists and, thinking aloud, what about adopting our own quasi-RSS: FML: Forage Mark-Up Language:

The first part (the channel tag in RSS); who provides the data:

  <name>libarynth cookery department</name> 
  <link>http://libarynth.org/</link> 
  <description>the plants in this list have been checked several times</description> 
  <language>NL</language>

The second part is a list of elements like these, each containing for each sighting the basic information
concerning a plant/tree that should really be included to be usefull. 

  <item>
  <specie>
     <latin></latin>
     <lan:nl>walnoot</lan:nl>
     <lan:eng>walnut</lan:eng>
  </specie>
    <location>
      <longitude>39.55375305703105</longitude>  
      <latitude>-118.9813220168456</latitude> 
      <altitude>1223</altitude> 
  </location> 
  <type>tree</type>
  <use>
      <edible>yes</edible>
      <medicinal>not known<medicinal>
      <fruit>nut</fruit>
      <poisonous>no</poisonous>
      <other></other>
  </use>
  <picture></picture> 
  <observation_date>Tue, 22 Jun 2010</observation_date> 
  <observer>Little Chef</observer>
  <description>old tree actively foraged by hungry, mandoline carrying, gypsies with bad temper and bad  breath</description>
  </item>
 

The specie tag collects names for the plant, the latin is the botanical name, the others are 'normal' names. The location tag is lifted straight from KML. The use-tag collects properties about the plant/tree being tagged that might be useful for parsing. Some other relevant information like date of last observation ends it.   
  
Just raving; there surely must be better ways to do it. IF AT ALL.