30.07.2009 Epitáfio
The Perl monks from Brazil accepted a challenge with an important social relevance. We are working, on our spare time, in the development of a system to manage the public cemeteries. Few people know, but the public cemeteries take a fundamental role regarding the respect for human rights, as well as for public health, giving the population that doesn't have the resources to pay for a tombstone in a private cemetery a memorial service and a decent burial.
At this moment we already stablished the features for the first release, and the deadline expectation is that we have the system working in the cemetery for the "dia de Finados" (day in memory of the people who past away). Yesterday we finished the first proposal for the data model (the software will be developed in Portuguese, but I guess you can figure out the meaning of the words).
The discussions regarding the system happen in the #brasil-pm channel at irc.perl.org, we have a space in the perl.org.br wiki to document the development process and a github space to host the source code.
The system will have a Web interface and is going to use PostgreSQL, specially because of the timestamp-related features and also for possibly using PostGIS, allowing to store the spatial information about the tombstones and the cemetery map.
As the development follows, I'll post the updates here.