LUGNET Plan

Administrative / Plan / 3


	Phases of Activation
	Because the scope of LUGNET is quite large, activation will occur in a series of dependent phases which can be tested and proven progressively within the context of previous phases. It is difficult to predict exactly how many phases of activation will occur, since development must remain at all times flexible to the current needs of the system, but there are only a finite number of things on the drawing board, and these all seem to fall naturally into three major categories.		Core functions fall into three categories
	Phase I comprises everything to do with the basic underlying infrastructure of the community: Member homepages Location of members within the community Participation in user groups and local message boards Phase II comprises everything to do with the world of LEGO-related knowledge: Indexing of general-interest documents Photos of member creations, optionally with building instructions Community-driven databases such as a cross-referenced list of all official building sets and pieces manufactured Personal-collection inventories for a variety of applications Using Phase II as leverage and Phase I as foundation, Phase III comprises software and supporting data to handle any necessary level of commerce within the community: Integrated trading post Straight person-to-person sales Integrated auctions and reverse auctions Integrated billing and parcel accounting Notifications of availability of items within resale markets according to user-defined criteria Note that Phase II is dependent on the infrastructure established in Phase I for data entry, although it may be jump-started by the assimilation of pre-existing databases such as the Fibblesnork LEGO Guide, which contains information on over 400 sets, the AucZILLA elements database, which contains information on over 1,300 elements from over 100 building sets, or any other large body of data anyone might wish to contribute.		First the ground is seeded with a member identity network Upon this is grown a network of organized data and knowledge And upon these are grown an integrated system of commerce
	From a dataflow perspective, LUGNET is simply a network of interconnected data repositories and subroutines which act on the data (a custom OODBMS). About two dozen data repositories make up the system. Diagrammatic components in close proximity indicate strong logical cohesion, while distant components indicate weak or no cohesion. Lines also depict strong logical cohesion between relevant components. Phase I appears in blue, Phase II in red, and Phase III in green. It is important to understand that as higher-level phases are added, earlier phases remain in the system and continue growing indefinitely. Thus the phases refer much more to the website software and database schemas than to the actual data within the system.		Many interconnected databases make up the system (See this larger)
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