pcplantdb

["John Schinnerer" <john@eco-living.net>]

Aloha,

I've had an idea for a place to start, functionally speaking - perhaps it's a
way to approach creating a core of an extensible system.  Anyhow, bear with me
as I start from zero:

What we call 'guilds' in permaculture are groupings of patterns we've observed
in 'natural' systems.

In other words, some people looked and looked and then created the concept
"guild" based on what they saw.  They repeatedly recognized certain patterns
in plant (and plant/animal) communities that seemed to support the health and
robustness of those communities.  For example, they survived longer than those
that didn't survive as long (evolution, in a nutshell).

They then realized that with some knowledge of plant 'families' and
associations and similarities and differences and so on, they could substitute
one plant for another in these guilds.  They might even be able to create
entire guilds from human-chosen plants, attempting to imitate adequately
enough (or even improve upon) whatever it was they thought made a guild a
"good thing" out there in the world.

So now we have a concrete application emerging from these observations -
manipulate a "known guild."  This seems like a basic PC thing to support and
has already been mentioned as a possible goal of this project.

So - a place to start DB-wise - very simple explanation:

Build up a database of observed ("known") guilds.

Also build up a database (a conceptual separation - not necessarily two
separate DBs) of lots and lots of plants.

Implement logic to take a "known guild" in the DB and provide info on plants
that could be substituted into that guild.

Some elaboration:

"Known guild" data will identify individual plants in the guild as well as how
a given plant fits into the guild (e.g. interrelatings in the guild).

The logic will take a specified plant in the known guild and search individual
plant info to match specified similarities and differences for the
substitution plant(s).  For example, same climate zone and rainfall and
shade/sun tolerance but different soil type and produces human-edible food. 
Or, one climate zone colder with more rainfall and less sun and produces
animal fodder and fixes nitrogen.  And so on...

I'll leave it at that - that's a big chunk already to actually detail out,
spec, design and implement.

It's also small and simple enough to seem doable at a basic level.  It can be
made more complex incrementally - we don't have to have the kitchen sink level
of plant and guild relevant data to get a model working.

Comments?

John S.




John Schinnerer - MA, Whole Systems Design
------------------------------------------
- Eco-Living -
Cultural & Ecological Designing
People - Place - Learning - Integration
john@eco-living.net
http://eco-living.net