Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

pcplantdb - Re: [pcplantdb] Perhaps a place to start

pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: pcplantdb

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Richard Morris <webmaster@pfaf.org>
  • To: pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] Perhaps a place to start
  • Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 11:49:41 +0100

John Schinnerer wrote:

Great comments, I can see you've been doing some thinking.

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.

> SNIP

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.

Yes, great. I've come to a similar conclusion on this one in the
White Oak Plant Guild

http://www.ibiblio.org/pfaf/pcplantdb/showthing.php?BOTNAME=White+Oak%2FHazelnut+community

I've divided things up so the Guild can have
Natural Guild Members - grow in wild
and Cultivated Guild Members - versions for humans

Building on what you have written I can see that we might have
Natural Guilds - guilds observed in wild
Cultivated Guilds - guilds used by PC people
with some sort of linking between the two.

We might also want a "search for related plants" button
to find closely related plants. Maybe same genus or same family.

I can see that a visual interface wight be much better for
assembling these things the rather static web forms interfaces
which lack on the input side.

I can also see a need for Chad's style searches which give
a 1 paragraph description of the plant, this would make
selecting alternative plants easier.

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...

Indeed. Its actually very easy to add these characteristics
to Guilds (use the "add new section" part of the main page).

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

The spec is quite a big thing, I've done some specing wiki
but a lot more though and detail is needed.

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.

Indeed.

Rich

--
Plants for a Future: 7000 useful plants
Web: http://www.pfaf.org/ same as http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/pfaf/
Post: 1 Lerryn View, Lerryn, Lostwithiel, Cornwall, PL22 0QJ
Tel: 01208 872 963 / 0845 458 4719
Email: webmaster@pfaf.org
PFAF electronic mailing list http://groups.yahoo.com/group/pfaf







Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page