Is Flex right for me and my project? Developers sought

Question

Sorry for the long post. I want to know if Flex/Apollo would
be a good platform for the following project.
There's also a question of how to store the data, but it will
almost certainly be XML.
Briefly, here are the questions, with more background to make
sense of
them below. I think it's an interesting project and we're
looking for contributors!
1. What's a good way to store about 20,000 texts that are
highly
hyperlinked and so that on would have a high degree of
flexibility in
how to display within both desktop and web-based
applications?
2. What's a good platform for developing an application to
display
the texts (usually several at once) in a flexible manner that
would also
a) be easy to finddevelopers who can work in the platform
b) be as OS independent as possible
c)enable one to utilize as many already existing modules as
possible, to speed development
d) be easily able to construct a web interface to interface
with the same text database.
e) have the ability to release code with some kind of open
source license.
The application I want to build is as follows:
So about two weeks ago I got very annoyed that there is no
freely
available Judaic text database (e.g. Bar Ilan/DBS Master
Library/Judaic Classics Library) type program available (the
commercial packages range from $80-$600).
There are of course some very good websites that
have a good amount of material easily and freely accessible,
but it's
largely spread out and the interfaces are pretty weak. The
same
applies to the commercial packages, the interface is quite
utilitarian, and doesn't seem to have evolved since the
mid-90s.
I stumbled across the website www.hebrewbooks.org which has
scanned
11,000 books, and OCRd about 10,000 to varying degrees of
accuracy.
They are also more than happy to share their information
freely. I
spoke with the head of the site, and he was into the idea.
Two things need to happen simultaneously. One being that the
texts
need to be prepared, which is a huge task in and of itself.
The most
important thing is to create the appropriate hyperlinks. In
most
cases, there is a central text (CT), say the Torah, with
commentaries
moving linearly along the CT and commenting on phrases as
they appear
in the CT. Each comment is called a Dibur HaMatchil (DH). Of
course,
within each DH, there might be references to other parts of
the CT, or
to virtually any other text. This really is like a normal
hyperlink.
This structure is pretty constant throughout the Jewish
library, its
found in the Torah, Mishnah, Talmud, Midrash, Shulchan Aruch,
etc.
Each of these CTs however, have different organizational
systems. The
Torah has Books, Parshas, as well as the Chapter/Verse
system. The
mishna has Tractates divided into Chapters, divided into
Mishnayot.
The Talmud has Tractates which are usually referenced
according to
Page and Side of the page (printing is standard enough to
allow for
this). Shulchan Aruch has 4 sections, which contain Simanim,
and
S'eefim. Sometimes, there are multiple CTs following the same
pattern
and discussing the same topic, so in essence, one CT becomes
a
commentary on another CT.
There are of course many books which are not necessarily
commentaries
on any specific text (i.e. not structured according to DHs),
but say
philosophical works which will quote from all over the place.
Even though we won't be trying to organize it all at once, we
need to
create a good data structure from the get go that allows for
all of
these connections to be made, that is easily searchable
(shouldn't be
a problem), and easily browsable (also not a big deal).
As for what needs to be done with this data...
I really see the killer app, what nobody else has done yet
to my
knowledge, as being able to select a CT, and choose which
commentaries
you would like to see on it, and then having a 'book'
autogenerated on
the fly, layed out according to pre-defined templates or
user-defined
rules (to a certain degree). With books now, any given
edition you
choose always has either too few, too many, or not quite the
right
combination of commentaries. I see this really becoming
awesome in
the next few years as e-paper/e-book readers become
(hopefully) cheap
and ubiquitous.
Ideally, there should be a tagging engine, so that each book
can come
with some pre-defined tags, allow the user to add their own
tags (and
share them back with the community), auto-generate keywords
(maybe
distinct from tags?) for a given text and then have search
and browse
features that leverage those tags. So if you want to see all
13th
century books from France and Germany dealing with personal
injury
law, it'll be a snap to find them. Or to conduct a free text
search
through any subset of the library you want.
Also, I'd love to see tag clouds and information mapping a la
www.quintura.com
www.kartoo.com
www.kartoo.net (no search here, just nice graphics)
www.ujiko.com
This would make it much easier to explore new sources of
information.
All current programs essentially require you to know exactly
what
you're looking for before you start. If you don't have the
right
phrase, you'll never find what you need, and there's no easy
way to
discover it.
And of course, there have to be tabs which can display either
an
autoformatted page, or a pdf of the original book.
So this is a big project, as you can see, but a good portion
of the
work seems to be done to me. On the data side, 10,000 books
are
already scanned and OCRd, remaining is the laborious task of
marking
them all up. Here, it would hopefully be possible to create
small
programs that would enable the masses of people who are very
familiar
with the texts, but know no computer-ese to aid in the task.
I think
there would be good response for at least the most important
texts.
On the UI side, all of the search/database features I
mentioned above
I think could be found in various open source repositories,
with only
the need to customize the code. The auto-layout stuff also
seems
pretty simple from an algorithmic point of view, assuming you
have
data that's appropriately marked up. Particularly if we stick
to
pre-defined templates. Adding user-defined templates later as
appropriate.
I'm probably infinitely naive, as I haven't coded anything
since
Pascal. I see a timeline of 1 year to a proof-of-concept type
application with a limited dataset, and 5 years to realize
what I've
described above.
FYI, in addition to finding good hearted volunteers, there
are some
good fundraising leads at the moment that could help things
considerably.
Any advice you have is more than welcome. If it's easier over
the
phone, then let's talk.
And if you're interested, we're still looking for just about
everything including:
1. Chief Software Architect
2. Coders
3. Referring me to people who might be interested
4. Anything else you want!
Hope all is well,
Andy

Answer 1

Coldfusion 9 (currently in open beta) has AIR SQLite Offline support
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/9.0/Developing/WSAFE323E5-CA8B-429e-BC1C-450DA839D7 05.html
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/9.0/Developing/WS2C3A7CC5-9A64-4a34-B66B-A2834C22D5 AE.html
http://askjayvir.blogspot.com/2009/07/coldfusion-9-air-sqlite-offline-support.html
Coldfusion 9 beta: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/coldfusion9/