Permaculture Database

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [permaculture] database, wiki, blogs, forums, etc
Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2006 09:05:01 +1100
From: jedd <jedd@progsoc.org>
Reply-To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>

 Hi Sean,

 ] The word 'dimension' is very important to my own
 ] views.  What I saw being developed was more like a

 I should probably explain my problems with dimensions - it was the
 best word I could think of, but it's probably not one that we all have
 exactly the same understanding of.

 I originally wanted a system that could track what I grew and where
 I grew it - in my case an area of about 120 square metres of tilled
 soil, broken down into 6 square metre plots.  It'd need to deal with:
 o  rotation tracking - alerting / suggestions for coming season,
 o  pests / disease - record keeping mostly, maybe prediction,
 o  performance - production of a given species in different plots,
 o  planning - companion, height (sun angle), water usage, timing,
 o  usage of plant - herbal / medicinal, edible, preparation etc.

 This quickly morphed into a system that could track:
 o  performance over time, not just space - ie, track rainfall and
     maybe other seasonal weather variances (to remove them from the
     equation, mostly) - as well as getting optimum growth by changing
     the week the seed went into the ground - another dimension
 o  similar figures coming in from many different people / sites,
     for comparative purposes again (oh look, you have a similar
     climate, similar soil, similar elevation / sun angle, I'll try
     the timing, plant combination, etc that you've done) - ditto

 It was a bit more complicated than this, but you get the idea.

 So I identified another project to work on instead.


 ] google interface to PFAF, which would easily convert
 ] into a wiki.  Though I don't like letting go of the
 ] data architecture, we do have to consider the audience.

 PFAF (purdue, etc) are great resources, but they suffer from north-of-
 the-equator parochialism, which you only notice once you live south
 of same.  Every resource penned by anyone in Europe or N.A. is
 written this way, but that doesn't make it any easier to do on the fly
 mental translations.  And obviously they don't do any of the time-
 tracking or comparative performance stuff.  And even more obviously,
 they don't cover *any* of the features that Lawrence is talking about.

 Jedd.
_