Permaculture Database

[matt <deepwinter@winterroot.net>]

Hey Guys,

I've done just a bit of review of what you are thinking about here and I find 
it fascinating, and very much in line with my interests.  Maybe I can help 
get this off the ground.  I'm very inspired to see that there are some people 
out there picking up on the idea of combining information systems and 
permaculture - I though it was somewhat of a long shot but it's great that 
there's at least some support for this as an idea.  To my thinking, 
mainstream agri-business, pharmacology, and all that mostly bad stuff uses 
crazy techniques - infomatics, computer modeling, etc - to achieve their near 
hegemony of the situation.  I really feel we ought to be able to apply these 
types of ideas in a better direction: permaculture, wildlands systems, and 
beyond.  It's interesting to me specifically because of how it changes our 
idea of what all this technology can be for.  Let's see what we can do here.

On to the question at hand -  I can see that there are a lot of threads to 
this conversation that need to all be brought together, so my next step is 
going to involve organizing the information that I've been reviewing into 
some kind of more comprehensive document.  First question - are there any 
resources other than the archive that I should be aware of?  I saw mention of 
a wiki, but also that it had been overrun by spam.  Would it be possible for 
people more up to date on the discussion to point me to additional useful 
archived list threads (as jedd did below) ?

Here is what I'm seeing going on here - please add or correct to this.  There 
are a few different ideas being thrown around.  Some of them jive together, 
others don't.  There have been a few other items people have contacted me 
about off list which are related but fundamentally different.  Since I'm a 
technologist, ALL are of interest to me, and I'm going to respond to those 
individually.  For moment though I will just address the PCDB idea, which 
splits into two main camps:

1) Highly searchable database of organisms with extendable attributes for 
each entry, like PFAF but improved for permie use.  The main goal would be 
for the average permaculture practitioner to be able to go to this resource 
and easily find a lot of information on interesting organisms for their 
particular needs, and to be able to draw off of other's experiences and 
contribute their own.  This is basically a collaborative tool that needs to 
be able to grow it's information over time, and needs to be flexible enough 
incorporate new organisms, or to be re-deployed for a different 
macro-bio-region (say something crazy like malaysia or something) and work 
out of the box without initial modifications.

2) Land/project/garden/experiment tracking and management application.  This 
is what Jedd was getting at about a year ago when discussing the wiki he had 
set up for his land.  Jedd - does it still exist?  Can I see it?  This kind 
of tool would be for recording everything you did and all kinds of details 
about it, and then having it be searchable and organizable in a way that an 
average human could work with.  That's a big challenge, but not unlike the 
kinds of things that companies creating software for tracking science 
experiments are looking at.  This is where we get into the 'infomatics' - the 
kind of thing that's going on in a hospital where somehow they try to keep 
track of all kinds of different records.  There's a couple of ways we could 
come to this. Here's a few ideas (and skipping stuff I don't recommend, like 
a giant monolithic planning tool for instance - too much, too complex)
        a) A suite of simple tools that accomplish basic tasks but can be 
combined as needed by the user/gardener.  Think               
                handheld - like an iphone app tied back to a database 
somewhere.
        b) Create a very flexible system that is much like (1) where you 
enter just your projects and organisms, and relationships 
                you notice between them.  Make this very searchable so that 
you can keep track of what's going on and more 
                importantly pick up on trends over the past years as your 
experiments/projects progress.   This is basically a data 
                management tool where the skill of the user in querying the 
history will result in pattern discovery.  The pattern 
                discovery itself is too difficult to automate (because life 
is beautiful) but the skilled gardener would pick up on things              
immediately given the right interface. 
        c) Extend (b) so that each practitioners personal findings can be 
automatically cross referenced with other's information.  
                This is a network database model, with a wealth of 
information available but reasonably parse-able.

The main thing here is to get some impressions from you guys about what kinds 
of things would be most useful from the land/project overseeing perspective.


3) Full scale recording and tracking of activity/productivity within an 
environment.  This is where the complex systems approach really gets going, 
as you have a lotta non-linearity in these kinds of scenarios, and lots of 
differential equations if you start trying to deal with micro or macro 
processes (chemical or weather).  To my way of thinking, the important thing 
is NOT to get too hung up on trying to create a model of your entire 
ecosystem (though this is what most computer modeling is currently trying to 
do).    The danger with trying incorporate ALL the information is that you 
start trying to create a system that is as complex as the ecosystem itself.  
However that doesn't mean you need to discard all this complexity, we could 
still work with this effectively in a variety of ways.  Some things I've been 
developing an interest in:
        1) Using energetic analysis to scientifically show the huge 
efficiency of natural and permaculture systems.
        2) Using information from (1) to help with planning
        3) Searching for fundamental processes that push an organic system 
towards success as opposed to failure
And other things too.  The first step in something like this might be just to 
set up a better way than a wiki to record all sorts of data and relationships 
without an endgame in mind.  Once the information starts growing and emerging 
it's own patterns, we start to work with it.  But be warned--- it's HUGE and 
as the nonlinearity unfolds you will find that such an exploration is not for 
the faint hearted!!




. . . . . . . . . . . OK, that was a lot of information and several ideas.  
I'd like to know if these 3 areas basically cover the main threads of the 
PCDB discussion, or if there are move avenues that have been explored.   If 
these are the 3 main ideas ( or more) I'll go ahead and create a wiki page 
that goes into more detail about them, and from there maybe we can choose 
something work on first.   A very important thing to keep in mind, is that 
what can/should happen with these 3 concepts is for them to be implemented 
separately but interact as an ecology of tools.  So what that means is that 
the info base of plants can feed the 'permaculture project stewardship' tool 
(2) and the complex systems project (3) - and vice versa.  It doesn't need to 
be all combined, but it gains a lot by working together and can be 
developed/evolved in tandem.    Crazy, huh?

Hopefully what I wrote is accessible for less technical people on this list 
as well.  If not, please ask questions - I've very interested in the ideas 
being thrown around here and I would like to prioritize doing some work on 
this project this year.  More details on this later.

An a nibble for the tech heads:  You are on the wrong track thinking about 
this in RDBMS systems.  What you want for this kind of thing is full scale 
OODBMS - yeah that's right, Object Oriented Database.   Informix is a famous 
one, but there are others that are open sourced.  Fortunately, this is one of 
my main areas of interest for the coming year.  OODBMS isn't new, but it has 
special problems.  We'll discuss these together in time, I hope!


Very Best,
Matt

http://www.winterroot.net/  (in progress)




On Feb 21, 2010, at 5:27 PM, jedd wrote:

> On Wednesday 17 February 2010 00:27:26 Paul d'Aoust wrote:
>> Hi, Jedd. My secret feeling is that, although RDF triples are quite a
>> thrilling and versatile concept, I just can't get my head around them,
>> and they may be very hard to abstract into something extremely simple
>> for the average permie to use. I'm trying to keep my mind open; that's
>> why I'm attempting to understand this RDF thing.
> 
> Agreed.  I feel that I'm missing something very important about 
> the subject, and yet I can't work out why (let alone what).  It's
> not a hugely complex construct, after all.
> 
> A fortnight ago I went over to FOSDEM [1] and by one of those
> weird coincidences, on the Friday night before it kicked off, I was
> in a pub having a yak with one of the guys who was there to do
> a doing a presentation [2] on SPARQL, RDF and tying in with things
> like Nepomuk.
> 
> It might have been the 11% beer, but I started to 'get it' .. though
> I really can't work out how it could be applied to the types of
> problems that we('re going to) have.
> 
> Maybe Matt has some ideas on this subject?
> 
> Matt - do you have access to the archives?  There's not exactly
> a *wealth* of background info from this list - a fairly torpid
> and uninspiring sequence of ponderings, I'd imagine, were I
> being totally candid.  ;) 
> 
> We've read your message to Keith from 2010-02-15T20:45:33 -0500
> but we're obviously in a different realm here than a CMS.  I think
> few of us really understand the complexities involved - though
> Paul Cereghino's message (and link to one of his PDF's) from 
> 2009-03-28T10:16:27 -0700 is an excellent, if ultimately quite
> depressing, example of an exception.
> 
> The 2 minute summary of my intent is to create a system that will
> let me record activity / productivity of different elements within an
> environment - and I thought I may as well add the extra dimension
> up front to allow others to contribute data about their own
> experiences.  At the moment it's a plan in my head and a few pages
> scrawled into various notebooks.
> 
> Obviously other people have substantively different end-games.
> 
> J.
> 
> 
> [1]  http://fosdem.org/2010/
> [2]  http://fosdem.org/2010/schedule/events/xd_nepomuk_sparql
> 
> _______________________________________________
> pcdb mailing list
> pcdb@lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/pcdb