Permaculture Database

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

Hi, Paul. You had some very interesting things to say in your last
e-mail, and while I think you're operating on an intellectual level a
few diplomas higher than me, I think I understand what you're saying --
do you mean that it's exceptionally difficult to model relationships as
complex as you see in nature, so you shouldn't really try to go down
that road? As we've talked about more and more complex relationship
modelling, I've started to feel that way myself -- there's just too much
to model if you want to be really deep and comprehensive.

I think permaculture is already a filter or abstraction or
simplification that lets us digest a bit of the complexity of natural
systems. My feeling is that we should do something similar and only
incorporate as much complexity as we really need. Perhaps something as
simple as a 'PFAF-plus-animals-and-guilds' would be entirely sufficient?
(I'd also like to see something a bit more interactive than PFAF, with
wiki-like contribution -- not only for the write-ups, but also for
observed characteristics of a certain organism. Because I might be able
to get my tarragon (e.g.) to survive in colder temperatures than some
other guy, because my soil has better drainage.)

I was really interested in what you were saying about humans being
really good at extrapolating connections, and that a database should
facilitate our ability rather than trying to make those connections
itself. (At least I think that's what you said!) Do you have any ideas
for what an implementation of such a system would look like?

Gosh, I wish I could just quit my job and create a working prototype of
this thing :)

(the other) Paul

On Sat, 2009-03-28 at 10:16 -0700, Paul Cereghino wrote:
> 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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> >
> >   
> 
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