I have a question/idea, and it may or may not have already been thought of/discussed on this forum.
I want to allow some of my users to be able to mix and match data online from other web pages using simple set functions similar to those found in LISP.
For instance, if a user finds a website with a list of U.S. presidents, I'd like them to be able to add the URL for that list on my website, my website would then screen-scrape the president list, and now have a permanent "functional" list of U.S. presidents which they can then link to other lists of relevant information.
If a user then finds a table with columns for "U.S. President Name" and "U.S. President Birthplace", my website could screen-scrape that table as well, "JOIN" the data, and now, whenever someone looks at my website's "U.S. President" list, they'll also be able to find a mapping for every president's birthplace. And so on for other data.
Eventually, I would want to get closer and closer to allowing users to play with these data lists in the way that LISP is able to manipulate this data - providing a full graphical interface for programming with LISP on a website.
Essentially, this would be like implementing LISP for the internet using some clever screen scraping scripts. LISP is great, but what it seems to lack is a large amount of data to fully show off its expressive power. The internet could provide that data.
Do you think this would work? Has it already been tried? I'd like your thoughts.
Thanks.