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What features would you suggest for this?

Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2009 5:26 pm
by josh
http://vehicle-data.com/
I am working on a new concept, an "open source database" (community collaboration). I posted a short 1 minute video on there about what it is all about. To sum it up the community will have access (moderated by voting) to collaboratively build & maintain a repository of data about vehicles.

What kinds of features are good for a site like this? Also what ideas would you be willing to contribute on how to make this work? I noticed on digg their algorithm seems to work by "screening" the suggested news stories for a certain amount of time, after which they appear to get pruned or archived if they did not receive votes.

Re: What features would you suggest for this?

Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 1:29 am
by matthijs
I'm not sure about your target population, but maybe some user system which shows who is who, who contributed what, who contributed most, got most approved votes for changes, etc. Then it's not only about the cars them selves, but about the members of the system as well. Like here on devnet for example, you don't only see questions and answers about programming, but you also see who is who, who contributes (most), you can send private messages, etc

Re: What features would you suggest for this?

Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 2:00 am
by daedalus__
i see a lot of models of cadillacs but it takes a long time to get to the year which is really the first thing people think about when they think about a car. i had to select so many models. many of them haven't been made for decades. plus some were confused between packages and models.

the cadillac brougham brought me to a search page with cadillac fleetwood broughams but a fleetwood could have the brougham style as a package for years it wasn't called only a brougham until like 1990.

features would be neat are like paint codes, part and make numbers, vin decoding, repair guides, videos and stuff, etc. i see alot of videos about engine & body repair or modification but there isn't really a good way to find them.

plus it might be neat to see famous examples of the vehicles. or a list of car shows in an area.

once i saw a video of a 78' el dorado with enough power to jump :)

p.s. look up helldorado

ediL;t p.s.s. i have pletnby more suggestisons

Re: What features would you suggest for this?

Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 3:32 am
by josh
Keep the suggestions coming. I do plan a way to let the user select the year first (vehiclefits.com, my other project, has this feature also).

Hopefully the community will suggest data corrections to improve data quality (maybe you can help test and tell me what features you would need to hypothetically make said changes).

One thing I noticed is they have listed

123 Foo
456 Foo

Where Foo is really the model and 123 and 456 should be trims (well at least if we were to follow DRY - dont repeat yourself). So that is 1 feature I realize I will need to add, that is... the ability to work with this data like a native spreadsheet application. Maybe I will use this. http://jqueryplugins.weebly.com/jquerysheet.html

http://jqueryplugins.weebly.com/uploads ... sheet.html Looks incredible

In a code update coming probably tomorrow you will be able to filter not just by car names but also combine category ( power sports, agricultural, cars, etc..) + country ( usa, mexico, canada and netherlands I currently have data coverage of, hopefully to expand much more when I open this to community editing)

Oh I have more data, much much more. For different countries, all those attributes I listed and more. 1 step at a time though.

Another feature I thought off was an integrated wiki page at the bottom of each vehicle page, but I'm not sure what implications that would have about keeping things structured, the goal is produce data that can be used out of the box (otherwise wikipedia already has tons of written prose about each vehicle).

Uploading photographs would be good too. Videos is an interesting idea but probably would be out of the scope until it got up and running. I want to mostly focus on features that empower contributors to work with the data ( for now).

This project is similar to http://pricecat.us/en/menu/services/index.htm open IE Cat project, but different in that mine is the first "open catalog" system that will be community driven ala wikipedia ( but different then wikipedia in that changes will be voted on and moderated by my company)

Re: What features would you suggest for this?

Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 6:11 pm
by daedalus__
if each car had a wiki then people could make repair guides. that would be really neat.

anyone can get a fsm or chiltons book but it would be nice to have another persons opinions or some photos or something. but sometimes it can be hard to get a fsm and chiltons are.. chiltons :\

a lot of the times people get themselves into a job without knowing what tools they need too.

Re: What features would you suggest for this?

Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 6:54 pm
by josh
Hmmm. Yeah that is a good point with the wiki page, offering that feature would bring more people to the site which could help contributions overall. I guess I could scan the wiki text for "data like" text and warn them to put it in the structured the way, but I will have to do some isolated usability tests to see for sure.

Would there be a way to come up with a list of fields they would have to fill out for this repair guide feature? Like adding a list of tools in a structured way we can actually index in the database? Or would it have to be free form English sentences? (could it be both?)

I just updated it with the category & the country, check that out and tell me what you think. It probably needs a little caching to help speed it up later on as I continue adding data

By the way you can use the login test/test or test2/test2

Re: What features would you suggest for this?

Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2009 7:00 pm
by daedalus__
all tools have names even if they are named after the part they help you work on. i dont know if you would want to index them like for a search though. usually you diagnose a problem before you gather tools to fix it. there are just a lot of situations where there are parts that get left out in instructions or little things learned from experience.

like one person i know wanted to do their head gasket so they went out and bought the gasket and i said wheres the other parts. "what other parts?" o. 0 what about sealant for the gaskets, bolts for manifolds, and what about the parts for the other things you want to take care of on the way down, what if you drop something? i said if you are gonna tear half the motor apart you may as well fix all the other problems as well.

you know and on my 85 cadillac the water pump went out and i remember someone telling me oh well you are probably just gonna wanna lift the motor up to get to it yada dada. well, he was right. i got it done but there was no room for ratchets and i couldn't see anything either. there were alot of things i wish i had known in advance i went to the auto store three times.

i figure most people who set out to do a complicated job know what they are doing but there is always room for enthusiasts as well advice from pros like 'hey are you doing a tune up? dont forget to check your ignition coil if you have one dada dadadada'. or when i was doing the head gasket on my 75 deville there were a lot of things that would have been easy to replace on the way down. alternator, water pump, intake, whatever.

about the tools list thing. some tools have pretty unique names but most auto stores have a unique part number for each tool. go browse the part and tool sections on cskauto maybe that'll help get some ideas brewing.

one thing that i want to tell you is that many mechanics aren't exactly technology inclined people so you should keep that in mind when designing. give them something they can comfortably tinker with.

it'd be nice to have the most common or popular makes listed first and/or an easy search to find them. i haven't heard of so many of the ones listed and some of them aren't even cars. there are backhoes and lawnmowers and stuff.

oh yeah last thing. the categories confuse me. i dont know what a class 8 is. when i see light or medium duty i think trucks. what's the average joe backyard mechanic going to look for when he comes here?

Re: What features would you suggest for this?

Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2009 7:19 pm
by josh
daedalus__ wrote:all tools have names even if they are named after the part they help you work on. i dont know if you would want to index them like for a search though. usually you diagnose a problem before you gather tools to fix it. there are just a lot of situations where there are parts that get left out in instructions or little things learned from experience.
I agree, it won't necessarily be a search engine but I do want to keep it objective, I don't think there's any way I can compete with wikipedia in certain things, but one thing I do plan to do differently is structure the information, so if someone wants to ask "what tools do I need to do this?" I can give them an exact list, and then don't have to read & read, or maybe someone could use the data to write software for a repair shop, so they can give the customer a quick estimate on repair costs.
like one person i know wanted to do their head gasket so they went out and bought the gasket and i said wheres the other parts. "what other parts?" o. 0 what about sealant for the gaskets, bolts for manifolds, and what about the parts for the other things you want to take care of on the way down, what if you drop something? i said if you are gonna tear half the motor apart you may as well fix all the other problems as well.
Funny
one thing that i want to tell you is that many mechanics aren't exactly technology inclined people so you should keep that in mind when designing. give them something they can comfortably tinker with.
Definitely one thing I will have to keep in mind
it'd be nice to have the most common or popular makes listed first and/or an easy search to find them. i haven't heard of so many of the ones listed and some of them aren't even cars. there are backhoes and lawnmowers and stuff.
Yeah good idea, now to figure out which ones are "popular" first :lol: for that I will have to wait and see
oh yeah last thing. the categories confuse me. i dont know what a class 8 is. when i see light or medium duty i think trucks. what's the average joe backyard mechanic going to look for when he comes here?
Definitely, the data right now is not the best, but its some of the best I could find. Over the next few months I will be splicing together more and more pieces of data to create a frankenstein. it's going to be bad, mistakes, duplicates where the only difference in the name was "F150" instead of "F-150", but I plan to make tools to help the community help me do the stuff, that computers just cannot do yet. Things like the famous F-150 dash example can be automated to an extent, but for the stuff that cannot be automated I need all kinds of ideas on how I can allow the community to help work with the data.

Would you be willing to help me beta test this thing? You seem to know a fair bit about cars, and seem to have the right sorts of ideas on how the data should be, just to be clear I'm not asking you to volunteer your time fixing the data, but volunteer your suggestions on how I can help others fix the data. The categories is a good idea. I need a way for people to request things to be merged. I need a way for them to request a category to be renamed. Need a way for them to request a new category, etc...

I still also need a way for them to request to add a new vehicle (which I worked on this weekend and will be in v0.3), I need a way for them edit via spreadsheet in the event the "trim" name was included as part of the "model" it would be too time consuming to go 1 by 1 to fix a "cross cutting" problem. They should be able to check off those records and select "add to my workbench" or something where they can use that jquery spreadsheet. Also I will be adding more fields besides Make Model Year, I will have all the wheel, body, paint, and radio related fields (I found out I have like 20 fields just about each car's audio system alone). And I have the idea this will keep growing, we will track every bolt, every cup holder, everything

Re: What features would you suggest for this?

Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2009 8:44 pm
by daedalus__
yeah i'll help. im not sure i even understand the whole idea yet but thats good because then i can be the opinion coming from outside the box. i can think like the mechanic or hobbyist while you think like the developer.

about the duplicate names thing, i think you should collect data for the most common names on the american market then create algorithms to prune anything similar but not an exact match to the list. the website doesn't have to be error free but you could try to sweep most of them under the rug. it would be good to do that before people start to upload content because then you will need to merge data which means designing another mechanism.

anyways i need more beer before i can think. bbl

Re: What features would you suggest for this?

Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2009 9:10 pm
by josh
Yes right now it will actually detect duplicates, and redirects them to that duplicate and lets them vote on it instead of submitting the duplicate
The problem with the dash is me & you obviously know it goes after the F, but if we had it listed F1-50, we DO want them to be able to suggest a change without them getting told its a duplicate, later on I will present them with a list of "potential" duplicates, and only "hard" stop them if it is an exact match character for character, and case sensitive.

I think you will be a good outside judge. I just tested out v0.3 but I realized I need to go ahead and optimize some stuff now so I reverted it back to 0.2 for now. V0.3 will have export as CSV feature. I also found some more columns:


Car Audio and Dash Kit Specifications

1. Turbo Kits
2. Turbo Wire
3. Antennas
4. Antenna Adapter (custom, power, factory antenna to aftermarket radio), Factory radio to aftermarket antenna
5. Double-DIN
6. Into Radio (non-amplified)
7. Amp Integration
8. Amp Bypass
9. Speaker
10. Speaker Mounting Bracket
11. Speaker Sizes & Locations ( Front Location #1, Front Size #1, Front Location #2, Front Size #2, Rear Location #1, Rear Size #1, Rear Location #2, Rear Size #2, Other Speaker (subwoofers, etc..)

Re: What features would you suggest for this?

Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2009 9:39 pm
by daedalus__
if people are going to build part lists they should start with parts. i wanna think more about it before i write a lot. email me or something

Re: What features would you suggest for this?

Posted: Fri Dec 18, 2009 2:47 am
by daedalus__
hows this going?