Originally Posted by
operator
Those aren't compatibility problems, that's just basic info - that any week old salesperson would know. There aren't "multiple thread params", modern frames are by vast majority english with a handful italian...
Seriously... nowadays the vast majority of bike parts are cross-compatilble unless you start working on bizarro downhill mountain bike stuff like 20mm front axles and 12mm rear axles... and 1 1/2" tapered headsets, and BB30 bottom brackets. OK, so there's some weird stuff out there, but usually the manufacturers know which "standard" they're building to and explain which "special" parts are needed to make the bike work.
It's not like the Bad Old Days when, on any given day, a bike with Italian or French or Swiss threads might come through the door and it's up to the mechanic to figure out what to get and where to get it. As Danno said, Sutherlands is a good source of info about bike "standards", but it still takes an experienced mechanic to know what fits where without modification, what can be made to fit, and what won't work at all.
(After seeing a Nuvinci CVT hub adapted to the rear of a two-rear-wheel recumbent trike, I try to never say "never". Anything can be made to work if you throw enough resources at it.)
I appreciate that you're trying to do this, but it's going to be very difficult and require a ton of labor for data maintenance.
You cannot simply code the XML and walk away. If you do this, someone will come up with a something that doesn't fit into your coding schema and you'll need to add something (at best) or rethink everything (at worst).
Just so you don't think I'm speaking out of my left ear: Danno and I met nearly 20 years ago at Bike'alog, which was an early project dedicated to bicycle information aggregation. It was primarily aimed at bike dealers who had some knowledge about mechanical issues, but less about parts sources and availablility. We built huge databases of bike parts and kept them up to date. Bike'alog is still going, but they've graduated from printed catalogs to floppy disks to CD's to online delivery.
In a later career, I did some testing on configurator software for
Chrome Systems . This is pretty close to what you're asking for: given a particular "model", what "options" can be chosen based on the rules set forth by the manufacturer. This isn't an easy job: it takes people with software smarts, people with domain knowledge (there's usually a specialist for each manfacturer), and people that combine the two. All of that requires a staff of 100 or so. What you're trying to do might be manageable with 8 to 10 people. I think... but I could be off by 50% either way.