« Mahou »

What Is «mahou»?

«mahou» is a database and php driven script that allows to track one's own collection online from any place in the world.
«mahou» tries to correlate the collection data (people, series, single manga) on the database and script level to create many possibilities to access this data once it's has been read into the database. First planned as a single user script, «mahou» was later expanded to support multiple users in order to avoid duplicate data sets on different copies of «mahou» and to facilitate the collection of the data by distributing the work on more people. Given a certain series already exists in the database (and the more users use «mahou» the more likelier this is) only a simple click is needed to add that series to it's own collection.
Further, «mahou» is concepted for multilangual collections supporting multiple languages for manga and it's rather easy to add additonal languages as «mahou» grows.

Data Quality

With this, however, comes a certain threat. «mahou» is all about data and data is it's most important asset. Only with good, correct and consistent data the one-click collection management can become reality and with more users adding to the database, the more inconsistent data can get into the database. One of «mahou»'s multi-user concern is thus to provide systems that help to review added data and keep it consistent while giving the users enough freedom to encourage them to add data.

Data Structure

To give an idea of how «mahou»is organized, knowing the basic data structure can be helpful: The collection is split in three aspects:

• The people who worked on a series
• The series in which the manga are grouped
• The individual manga

Each aspect can be related to each other, while the relations differ. People are related to series in a so called many to many relationship. One person can have many series assigned to itself and a series can have many people working on it. Each person to series relation also has three attributes that define in which way a person was involved in creating a series:

• Drawing (D): Doing the actual drawing of the manga
• Story (S): Exact development of the story
• Concept (C): Rough concept of the story or original story

Each person who is assigned to a series must at least do one of those three tasks. Any possible task should be able to be fitted to one of those three while "Concept" probably covers most of the more rare tasks. A person can do more than one task for a series and there can be more than one person doing the same task.
The second and much more simple relation is the series to manga relationship. It's a so called one to many relation and this means that one manga can be assigned to one and only one series while a series can take a unlimited number of manga. Most notably in this context is however, that the difference between language editions is not made on the series level. There is not one series for each language but one series for all of them. Each series can thus have as many different titles as languages. The differentiation between language editions happens on the manga level. One entry for a manga represents a physical version of a manga. The same manga in different languages will thus have one entry for each language.
At a further stage of development, at each level different information can be associated to people, series or manga (like photographs, series descriptions, ratings, cover images or ISBN numbers). Most of those possibilities are not yet implemented. The first goal was to gain a functional base of the script since adding the possibility to associate more info with entries is rather easy at any stage of development. However, a basic set of such information can already be added for manga and a module is in place, that can gather that info from Amazon through it's web interface it provides to developers. This allows to populate the entries with some basic data and most notably cover images to make the visual presentation of the data more interesting.

Purpose?

Apart from what has been done, two questions might arise:

• Where is «mahou» going?
• Is there any purpose to all of this?

To answer the second question first: Not really.
«mahou» doesn't have any commercial ambitions and once the collection has been added to the database and is presented in a pretty fashion, does it help anything? Again, the answer is no. There's no purpose apart from the heck of it. It's all about having your manga collection at home and wanting to index it and thus make it available to yourself in a concise manner and to make it available to others. Another important aspect is the processing of the compiled data to pretty statistics and graphs that don't help to avoid global warming but serve for personal amusement.
This helps to answer the first question: One goal of «mahou» is to collect a good set of data that helps users to easily compile their collections digitally and to process this data to pretty graphs. At the current stage there is too little data to meaningfully process it to graphs but as the database grows the possibilities to create graphs also increase.
Apart from this there might be some actually useful things to do with «mahou». Using it's data it can show which series are popular and even recommend series to people who look for a new one to read. It might also serve as a place to discuss about series and as a exanchge for used manga.