Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

pcplantdb - Re: [pcplantdb] a few things...

pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: pcplantdb

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>
  • To: john@eco-living.net, pcplantdb <pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] a few things...
  • Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2005 23:19:22 -0400

John Schinnerer wrote:

Meanwhile...
I am wondering if anyone else is wondering what happened to some of the
IMO most fundamental PERMACULTURE-CENTRIC aspects of PIW.

Maybe some things are on the back burner but I am not aware of anything gone missing that we initially thought worthwhile including. We could take a features inventory.

I am thinking at the moment of 'inputs' and 'outputs', e.g. what a plant
needs and what it provides.

Besides being most basic and useful for PC design purposes, this also
provides information that can be 'mined', correlated, etc. to determine
potential relationships.

As far as what I thought we were up to with this phase one of the project,
I thought the idea was to create a PERMACULTURE-CENTRIC plant database,
and IMO that means at the very least we must be able to search for,
return, add and edit PC-centric info such as 'inputs' and 'outputs'.

Since afaik info of this nature doesn't much exist as such in our startup
(PFAF) dataset, let's not forget to include it in the DB just because it's
not in our startup data. Let's consider what else of a PC-centric nature
also doesn't exist in our startup data and include that also.

In other words, I'm concerned that with so much initial data of a certain
meta-type, we are missing and/or forgetting to think about and implement
more PC-centric aspects that are not present in PFAF data or
functionality.

There is some info on 'inputs' and 'outputs' in PFAF data. However IMO
it's not easily recognizable as such, and I assume therefore not readily
searchable as such.

For example, how would I get a concise result set of plants that provide
fodder of a particular type, and/or for a particular animal?

enter search string then use an array of checkboxes to narrow results output

How would I get a concise result set of plants that thrive in acidic
tropical soil conditions (considering this as an 'input')??

use an array of nested checkboxes to narrow results
[box 1] soil type, if known; use technical language or common words
[box 1a]soil pH - ennter pH or words "acid", "very acid", "alkaline", "very alkaline"
- other words that might be used here: acid-loving, calciphobe, sweet soil, high calcium
[box 2] climatic conditions; use tropical, arctic, tundra, sub tropical;
use polar coordinates or country or continent + climate zone
Or use typical words: hot, dry, wet, arid, cold, cool
Then there's exposure preference: shady, filtered light, part shade, full shade, full sun, northern/eastern/western/southern exposure
And, daylength.





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page