Permaculture Database

[Paul d'Aoust <paul@heliosville.com>]

On Thu, 2009-03-19 at 00:27 +0000, jedd wrote:
> On Wed Mar 18 2009, negiliblek wrote:
> > ...pcdb as in maintenance and creation.
> 
>  Howdi,
> 
>  I think everyone wandered off in their own directions, either to
>  work on closed databases, or to set up a wiki that wouldn't do
>  what we wanted, or just plain lost interest.

Oh, so the wiki didn't gather a lot of steam, eh? That's too bad... it
looks like spambots kinda had their way with a lot of pages, which is
frustrating. I sort of thought that a wiki is nice and flexible (which
is good) but perhaps too flexible and unstructured for the sort of
database we wanted.

Sometimes, when I wake up in the morning, the first thought in my head
will be 'PCDB!' and my mind will start racing about how to construct
entity relationships that are flexible enough to model everything from
actinomycetes to lakes to chickens to exotic hand tools, yet structured
enough to have useful searches performed on them... it's tough work, as
I think we all discovered. I don't know how many E-R diagrams I've
scribbled out on pieces of paper that I've subsequently lost.

>  My response was to start writing some infrastructure code
>  (php, mysql, using codeigniter) with a view to getting my own
>  observations and data into a system, ideally abstracted sufficiently
>  to allow other users to contribute their data later.  I have done
>  very little work, and am still pondering how to store, and indeed
>  what to store, for locations, and relationships between entities,
>  and indeed what schema approach to take for non-organism
>  entities within the system.
> 
>  I am a long way off, though.

What did you eventually come up with? If I recall correctly, I think you
were the first one with a schema to show off, and it got me interested,
because you had some good ideas. I think that's important to get the
ball rolling too -- somebody with a good idea, who can produce some
code, regardless of how hackneyed it is, as long as it works.

I've also been thinking -- is the database for PFAF publicly accessible?
Because if they give permission to others to use the info, it might be a
great starting point for making the database useful. Not their schema,
specifically, but if we were to import their data into the 'plants'
section of our own structure, it might make the PCDB useful enough to
garner a lot of interest.

Saves having to do a whole bunch of stuff from scratch, which strikes me
as a very permaculture thing to do.

I would love to start thinking about this again -- life is very busy
right now (I got one of those dumb 'real jobs', which pulled me away
from the outdoors, but also prevented me from defaulting on my
mortgage). But if there were some government grant for people like us...
dang, wouldn't that be fun?

Paul d'Aoust