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pcdb - Re: [pcdb] jedd's requirements

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Subject: Permaculture Database

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  • From: jedd <jedd@progsoc.org>
  • To: pcdb <pcdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [pcdb] jedd's requirements
  • Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2007 21:10:41 +1000

On Saturday 31 March 2007 4:04 pm, Lawrence F. London, Jr. wrote:
> Concurrently.

Okay .. by whom, then? If it's the same set of people, what's in
it for them (and why are we on two mailing lists).

If it's not .. how do the two groups feel about it, and would there
be an intent to merge the systems in the future?

> What we have been talking aboutlately - a permaculture fauna/flora
> relationships database; a system revealing relationships between plants and
> plants, plants and animals and animals and animals. Or justleave out
> animals for time being is this is a better way to get started.

Leaving animals (and other items, such as you cite, soil, water
features, earthworks, climate, tools and equipment, methodologies
and so on) out of the mix at this point would be like leaving all
those things out of a permaculture landscape design process -- you'd
just be creating problems for yourself later, and you'd be building
a greatly degraded system.

You might not physically introduce animals into your physical system
for a couple of years, but you'd definitely cater for their presence
in the environment - you'd leave spaces, you'd put those spaces in
the right spot, you'd engineer trees and earthworks in accordance
with where and how you ultimately wanted everything to be.

> I see what you mean and am trying to make suggestion that are achievable
> software-wise, within the limits of my knowledge of such (I am learning a
> good bit reading you all).

Fairy nuff. From what I've seen so far, nothing unachievable has
been touted -- if anything, people are pulling back from grand plans
to something sub-optimal, either in the name of making it less
complex or to meet pre-existing ideas of what's achievable.

I suspect the latter doesn't do anyone any favours -- plant databases
already exist, and building another incomplete one isn't going to
be very appealing to programmers, or useful to Pc designers.

Let's think *really* big and only scale it back once we know for
sure that we can't do something. Aiming low means you meet your
expectations .. but that's a Pyrrhic victory.

> As I see it you're not necessarily splitting your information up and
> parcelling it out to other web apps but adding on useful apps with features
> that we will need and that are not provided by the RDB.

Ahh, I think I see the problem there. The distinction with the DB
versus extant techs such as CMS / Wiki / etc ... ?

I see the system that we're talking about starting to talk about
designing as incorporating all the functionality that we need, and
if that pulls in existing components, all well and good. I'm not,
though, drawing a distinction between what we build and what we
take off the free shelf at this point.

> I do think that one of our most difficult jobs will be to
> get people to use and contribute to the database. Comments?

Entirely agree.

On the upside, if it is constructed in such a way as to engender a
great deal of faith in the quality of the data it contains and the
ways that you can extract that data, then I think it will attract the
kinds of people (and their data) that we want to attract.

OTOH there's a few people in here, I gather, who would be happy
to have a system that logs their own observations. For my own part
I just want to take that up one level to allow multiple sets of
observations to exist so I can share them with other people (the
worth of the data increases for both parties).

Jedd.




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