Permaculture Database

[Paul Cereghino <paul.cereghino@comcast.net>]

Hi folks,
I did most of the category work and initial entries on the now dead 
wiki. The spambots won, and there was no wind in that sail. Good lesson.

Here is a publication from my professional life.  
http://www.pugetsoundnearshore.org/technical_papers/conceptmodel_06.pdf
Which expresses some of the complexity of modeling ecosystem dynamics.  
The combination of multiple scales, and multiple dimensions makes linear 
connections very difficult to catalog in a useful way.  (for example, 
tool is both an physical object and a range of potential disturbances, 
and operates at different scale than a self-regulating plant population, 
such that the tool is linked to the plant through human labor and a 
disturbance regime which has both spatial and temporal dimensions...). 

I think the challenge lies in the role of the human as user of the the 
model.  Human brains are beautifully adapted to non-parametric 
multi-variate multi-dimensional analysis.  The role of PCDB is to 
represent complexity in a way that facilitates the human brains ability 
to detect pattern.  The most important pattern 'de jour' is not 
necessarily native to the data of the PCDB.  Rather a PCDB is a 
representational tool that challenges the development of the human 
mind's ability to relate to complexity.  The purpose in not to try to 
represent to world through the hopelessly linear models viable in code, 
but to provide a tool that increases opportunities for inspirations that 
then enter into a compendium of patterns that can be searched.

I suspect you can describe spatial nesting, temporal nesting, or 
potential interactions, but not necessarily all three simultaneously in 
a meaningful way.

Paul Cereghino


>  The second thing is relationships.  I want to be able to define a
>  relationship between any two things - organic or otherwise - and
>  so I'm trying to keep this abstract, flexible, and useful.  At the
>  moment I'm thinking that I need to cover two broad aspects of
>  the relationship between items.  First, structural - that one item
>  is a subset of another.  This is relatively straightforward by a
>  component_of table that just has parent and child FK's back to
>  the organism/non-organism tables.  The second is the harder
>  one, and concerns the type, or degree, or quality of the relationship.
>
>  I'm thinking of things like 'provides', 'requires', 'works with',
>  'dislikes', 'prevents' - as the direction or quality of the relation,
>  and then perhaps a -10 to +10 quantity to assign to that
>  relationship.  I have (yet another) sub-problem handling whether
>  that degree or quantity should be variant based upon a use or
>  other factors (soil types, climate, site, aspect, etc).
>
>  So .. where did you get up to with this stuff?  Did you head down
>  this mental path already and discard it, or have you got some
>  hints on where I can take this?
>
>  Jedd.
>
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