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  • From: Bear K <bear@ursine-design.com>
  • To: Permaculture Plant Database <pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] contact info
  • Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 19:30:11 -0800

Super quick addition:
I'll spam harvester proof 'em ( you [at] someplace [dot] com ), so don't worry about web exposed email addresses.

I'd also like to say it seemed like a very good event. Met and talked with quite a few interesting people. One person (Mark) works with a guy (@ onevillage.biz) who has done ecological GIS work in Kenya, etc and knows those systems very well. So good overlap with what Lawrence has been wanting. I've also seen some of the realtime (on an average laptop) earth rendering software that folks are working on, and it is truly amazing. Really can give you that sense of scale, and place (B Fuller would be proud). The guy from oneVillage really was into being able to pare down results to match the biome of the user.

One of the major domains of the PlaNetwork crowd is social networking tools. It think there is a good deal of overlap from there to showing and making visible the (potential) networks within design elements.

One person quipped during the presentation "so...when you've entered and cataloged all 200 million species...". To which I didn't respond quickly too. None-the-less, it brings up something about the structure of the database. It seems like objects should be able to "inherit" properties of their "children" (to put it in hierarchical terms) like in OO programming. Only the things that differ from the parent need be explicitly noted. A cultivar is the child of this species, has all its parents properties, BUT it's height is 2 meters and flower_color is red (seed pods are more palatable too). (We can also assume, since it inherits from plant, that needs include "CO2, water, nutrients, sun" and outputs include "O2, water"....duh..) This really means that you don't have to have every, single, individual plant or element cataloged to make the system useful. Like a fractal, the general network and forms will be visible, adding the additional items will make the system richer, and more useful when you're looking at those finer details and characteristics of cultivars, etc.

Part of my interest in RDF, OWL, etc is that it seems to be capable of describing a system like that.

OK, a few notes from the road. Hope you're all doing well.

Cheers,
Bear





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