pcplantdb

[Richard Morris <webmaster@pfaf.org>]

Folks,
        I've had a play about with TouchGraph to see what
we could do with it. Have a look at
http://www.ibiblio.org/pfaf/pcplantdb/PlantFamilyTree/PlantFamilies.html
in which I've put the family tree from Kingdom down to Species
as a TouchGraph. (Note for size reasons there are separate
graphs for each family).

A few comments:

It would be easy to integrate this with the database. A days work.

TouchGraph is not fully mature yet. Documentation very lacking,
still a few bugs and some essential feature missing.

Worse bug is that its crashed my browsers and hung my computer twice.
Both times I was in the middle of writing a message to the list
which got lost. Bah Humbug!

It was quite fun playing with the family tree exploring the 
relationships between families. A good tool for exploring systematics.

I would not want to use this as the main way to find a plant.
Not only do you need to know the botanical name but also which family,
class and order its in.

It be nice to see what could be done with guilds but I only
know one guild so far! Anyone want to write up some more guilds!

There is still a lot of thinking needed about guilds, how do they
relate to each other? Do we have a nice tree structure like the
plant kingdom or a looser structure?

Anyway hope people have a bit of fun playing with it.

        best

                Rich



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