Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

pcdb - Re: [pcdb] Modelling RDF in relational databases

pcdb@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Permaculture Database

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: matt <deepwinter@winterroot.net>
  • To: Permaculture Database <pcdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [pcdb] Modelling RDF in relational databases
  • Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:44:46 -0500

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





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page