Permaculture Database

[jedd <jedd@progsoc.org>]

 Hi Lawrence,

On Saturday 31 March 2007 1:42 am, Lawrence F. London, Jr. wrote:
> There only needs to be one database, one that contains much plant
> information, eventually information about other living things encountered
> in a permaculture system, one that has the ability to reveal relationships
> between these things.

 Is your expectation that the two (or three) components need to be
 developed consecutively rather than concurrently?

> The concept would be a permaculture database, a discovery tool showing the
> relationships between elements in a permaculture system, useful for system
> design and guild documention. Maybe a future enhancement could include a
> general permaculture information resource (a Permapedia).

 Leaving the Permapedia thing aside for the moment, can you please
 expand on the description there .. maybe some screen mockups (just
 in text on mail, maybe fixed font it if that's easier) showing the way
 the tool lets a user discover things, f.e.

 My biggest conceptual problem at the moment is that much of the talk
 is highly abstracted and very underlying-design oriented, neither or
 indeed both of which are not very useful for designing the actual
 system or working out if such a system is actually feasible.

> Adding a wiki, blog and cms might make it easier to expand the scope of the
> project without making the relational database any more complex than
> necessary.

 I'd imagine they'd be a tickbox in the admin module of whatever
 CMS we were building the system into -- however my concern with
 wikis, blogs (erk!) etc are that you split your information up at
 that point, and by doing so risk or guarantee that much of the info
 you want to capture within your tightly defined db ends up as free
 form and ultimately unrecoverable / unusable data external to the
 place you really need it.  This is probably a job for training and
 moderation, but you'll always have unexperienced (with the site)
 users popping in, and you'll always have the problem that typing
 away into a non-structured text box is far more convenient than
 accurately filling in specific pieces of data into many boxes.

 Jedd.