Hi all

With all this recent talk about tex's proXML library I thought it might be a good time to give a more public airing to something I've been building to enable people to tag and share data (just like you can tag and share photos on flickr) remotely through XML...

It's called environment XML http://www.haque.co.uk/environmentxml/live because the original hope was to be able to find a way to link up remote environments and spaces by "borrowing" data that was sensed or recorded by them. I've been hoping to get this going for Arduino, once the ethernet version is released because then you would be able to have it untethered to a computer but in the meantime it occurred to me it might be useful for people who just have processing applets they'd like to link remotely (or just share your data).

For example, if you are sensing your local temperature, then you can share that data with others so that, e.g. someone else could build something that is responding to temperature where you are (or mouse clicks, color values or whatever). They might then share their sensor data (or sound level or whatever). And since it's based on XML it can be platform independent; you just need an <environment> with <datastream> children (with datastreamid and value attributes), each of which has an unlimited number of <tag>'s that contain the tagging words.

The template for a Processing file , available here: http://www.haque.co.uk/environmentxml/live/exml_in_out_template.zip means you just need to change a few lines in the processing file to get it going (i.e. the words you want to use to tag your data; and the remote streams you want to connect to) and not worry about all the XML stuff which can get a little opaque at times... you will also need tex's very nice http://www.texone.org/proxml/ proXML library.

You can receive input XML from the environment xml website simply by clicking on a location or a tag and then selecting the datastream URL which will serve XML containing various datastreams identified by a number of tags. Paste this URL into the template at the required point.

In order to add your output XML to the environment xml website you will, for the moment, have to contact me for the URL and password (make sure you know your IP address). It's a pretty straightforward process from that point, so it would be great if you are interested in sharing some of your streaming data to build up the connections... exml [ at ] haque [ dot ]  co  [ dot ]  uk is the email...

please of course let me know if you have any comments...

usman