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pcplantdb - Re: [pcplantdb] needing direction

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  • From: Chad Knepp <pyg@galatea.org>
  • To: Permaculture Plant Database <pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] needing direction
  • Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2005 09:20:33 -0600

Richard Morris writes:
> Chad Knepp wrote:
>
> > dev.permaculture.info is current. The latest changes are edit and
> > delete of comments. Look at plant=4433 for some examples or make your
> > own with the accounts "Test User" and "Test Two" both have password of
> > "password". Try to hack other accounts if you can.
>
> Works for me.
>
> > I'm hoping that a norm will develop of people replying to comments and
> > keeping a threaded discussion going under the sections Uses, Culture,
> > etc.
>
> Hum, not sure if we want thing to look like a threaded discussion.
> This will give it a very different feel to a more wiki-style approach.
>
> Danger with discussion is that things could get long and rambleing.
> I perfer an environent which encourages things are a bit more focused.
>
> I think we'll need some discusion about this.
> Not to worry for now. Its still very dev at moment and the
> infrastructure is good.

Well, I was thinking that moderation would straighten a lot of the
ramble. Moderation could even override threading, so the highest
comment in a thread could reparent the original... or something. I
agree that threading has some issues, but the absence of threading
*really* has issues when you start to deal with hundreds of comments
on a page. Of course user/authors could ignore threading if they wish
and just attach a comment to the plant directly. I see threading as
being sort of the section topic (Uses, Propagation, etc.) in this
case. I think the thing that will save us from many comments of mixed
quality is moderation, whether they are threaded or not.

> > > One thing I'd be very keen to see is mixing in the tanplant data.
> > > I know the guy who submitted it would be keen to see his data live on
> > > the web. Its also technically chalanging in how we can mix the two
> > data
> > > sets. This seems to fit well with the comment idea. Think of this as
> > > another large batch of comments. (It would be OK to miss out some
> > fields
> > > if clashes emerge).
> >
> > Well, I was hoping that when authorship features where implemented,
> > that someone [else] would add the data. Having the server seperated
> > from the client would allow xml-rpc custom clients to add datasets
> > such as this.
>
> I'm happy to add this. But I'd need some instruction on how to do it.
> Its probably easiest if I do it in SQL as its a lot of data to add.

Well, it could also be done with custom clients (xml-rpc) and would
probably be even easier than direct SQL.... that's my hope anyway for
xml-rpc clients.

> Two problems spring to mind.
> 1) Latin names may be different. So I'd need to get hold
> of synoyms to find appropriate matches.

This is not really hard to do. I did this with the USDA plants
database at one point and found around 600 matches of botanical names
and synonyms (synonyms is a seperate table). It's about a paragraph
of SQL though.

> 2) Scheme difference. There some fields in tanplants
> which don't fit with pfaf namely
>
> STEM - Stem description
> LVS - Leaf description
> INFL - Inflorescense description
> FRUIT - Fruit description
> ROOT - Root Description

These look like plant attributes to me. I need to do some database
restructuring when things aquire authors/owners. This would be a good
time to make changes to the schema. We should talk again about the
necessary attributes a plant should have. IIRC everyone liked the
existing schema but nobody had anything super important to
add... except 'root habit'.

> BIOL - Biological industrial uses of this plant.
> CHEM - Chemistry information about this plant.
> COMR - Commercial application of this plant.
> PERS - My own personal experimentation and use of this plant.

These look to me like comment types of information, except for CHEM
and I'm not sure what that is even.

> Are we going to be stuck with just the pfaf sections/heading
> or can users add their own?

Well, I think the attributes of a plant should become fixed at some
point, and I'm not really sure I want to implement column additions to
tables by end users;-) I think a lot of the misc. type information
can be effectively stored and retrieved via comments.

> > I think that our dataset should be able to accommodate all pertinent
> > info, if not we have some schema work to do.
>
> If I can fit this data in, then I'll be happy with the schema!
> (i.e. it will be flexable enough).

If there is pertinent info. and you can't fit it in
appropriately/effectively we have failed.

Cheers,
Chad

--
Chad Knepp
python -c 'import base64;print base64.decodestring("cHlnQGdhbGF0ZWEub3Jn")'




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