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  • From: Richard Morris <webmaster@pfaf.org>
  • To: PCPLANTDB <pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [pcplantdb] Acheivements
  • Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2005 16:00:48 +0100

Hi All,
As part of my PGCE I've had to write a bit about the projects I'm involved with. I though I'd post it here for your enjoyment.

Rich

I'm a founding member of this project which is attempting to build a collaborative framework for plant information and Permaculture (Permaculture stands for permanent agriculture and is a broad term encompassing many new ideas on sustainable methods of agriculture). There are about seven core people involved from across the globe as well as a number of others on the sidelines.

The project was first discussed on a mailing list two or three years ago. It remained a vague set of ideas for over a year until June last year when we heard that we had attracted $10K funding from the Threshold Foundation.

The funding has started a process of turning a set of wild ideas into a working project. and some of the money has gone to funding core development time. Much of the work has revolved around how we actually organize ourselves, it is easy to exchange ideas on a website but quite another to agree on decisions and begin implementing. To date we have:
- Established the website at www.permaculture.info,
- Produced a graphical design for the website
- Developed the core infrastructure for the technical side of the
project.
- Established an issue tracker to track bugs in software and provide
infrastructure for managing the development process. Esentially this
offers a more structured means of communication than a mailing list.
- Established a wiki: this is a collaborative tool for working on the
specification and other documents needed for the project.
- Started on developing the formal specification for the project
describing in detail the aims and objective of the project, milestones
etc.
- Started talks of collaboration with various groups including the
Permaculture Association UK, Heide Hermary at Gaia College
http://www.gaiacollege.ca Thomas Naegele who has provided the TANPLANT
data on the Edible and Medicinal Plants of the Great Lakes.
- Exchanged nearly 3,000 emails!

There is still much to be done:
- Complete the specification, in particular the parts relating to
organizing the data (Schema)
- Develop the core infrastructure to allow user contributions
- Build more collaborations and import more data.
- Express data in format suitable for machine reading through the
semantic web (XML dialects).
- Publicly announce the project when is has reached a suitable level of
maturity.
- Develop a Rich Client interface which will allow a graphical view of
the data and could serve as a design tool.

In many ways the development of this project have mirrored my development in the PGCE, building the specifications bares relation to devising a schema of work or lesson plan with a clear statement of aims and objects. We hopefully all learnt something about interpersonal communications (even with the limitations of email). Overall representing a shift towards a more professional approach which seems to be producing benefits.

My personal role in the project has been minimal and surprisingly I've not written a line of code to date. Instead I've working on thing like specifications and schema issues. This marks a significant change for my role in the project and has been a good learning experience for me to know that things can move forward without me having to do all the programming.

One interesting side line for me has been thinking about the semantic web which is a direction in which the web may develop. Here rather than the traditional web page which is focused on presentation the semantic web focuses on adding meaning in a machine readable fashion to web pages, through the use of mark up. Potentially it could be possible to build application like an general semantic web graphing program which would allow any data on the web to be graphed. This could a great educational tool allowing students to easily produce graphs of the populations of countries or the weights of chemical elements.




  • [pcplantdb] Acheivements, Richard Morris, 06/30/2005

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