One of the things in the "todo's" was to start implementing the CNML (Community Networking Markup Language) in order to evolve into an architecture much more oriented to the Spontaneous Networking paradigm.
By having some spare time during this holidays, here we have a first real world draft. It collects the experience of a couple of years developing data models applied to free network provisioning.

The code uses simpleXML php functions and is oriented to ve very fast still while exporting thousands of nodes and their contents. The XML is very human readable.

What is expected by having this is a significant step forward in the way of developing free networks, by enabling a decentralized and spontaneous managing but still being able to consolidate information and networks interoperation.


That's just a first implementation. Lots of more things have to be added. Including DTD & documentation (although the format is very straight forward). You can get examples of this by following the CNML link which now appears at the bottom of each page (node or zone) in the guifi.net provisioning application.


After this, we will be able to decouple much more every single functionality since will be no longer need to pull from internal tables (drupal, mysql...) for many things. As en example of the applications to migrate already available at the guifi.net site are:

• "unsolclic" config generator
• mapping applications based on OoenGIS (maps.guifi.net)
• decentralized snmp & graph servers for network monitoring
• POI file generator for popular navigators, i.e. ".ov2"
• etc.