pcplantdb

["John Howe" <warlock@arashi.com>]

> Thanks for the intro.  If you think you will have time to participate
> on this level I suggest you consider being part of the decision making
> group.  I'm into it but the rest of the group needs to weigh in on it
> as well.  Permaculture geeks are a rare breed, almost as rare as
> computer programmer farmers ;-)

I know I have seen my name on some documents. Stephanie will have to
distinguish between John S. and John H. now >;}~


> Wow, really good stuff I hadn't thought of.  This would be a great way
> to consider different combinations of relationships of elements.  I
> definitely think Needs and Provides should be plant attributes.  I'm
> not having any revelations as to how to handle these over time... we
> need to think on that one for a while.  The other issue that I can
> forsee is that we currently don't have much of this kind of info in
> our datasets, except for part of Provides and the cultural
> requirements part of Needs.  This is going to take considerable
> authoring.

Yes, and this model applies to non-plant items as well. If I recall, the 3
sisters model can be expanded to include insects, etc.

> Another thing to start turning around in your brain is how we should
> hand geographical differences in general.  I've been thinking about
> this for a couple of months and haven't had any stunning insights.
> The only thing so far that seems reasonable is to start with a
> non-specific locale description of the element and then both author
> and display locale specific differences for users from that locale.

I was looking at the postgis handler for postgresql a while back. ( @
http://postgis.refractions.net/ ). And I was playing around with the Grass
application as well ( http://grass.itc.it/ ). I don't know if this could
be applied to mysql or not. I would tend to more formal data tracking
upstream. Then again, is GIS an international standard, or is there
another geolocation RFC we should follow?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Howe, B.S, M.A.
http://www.arashi.com/
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The most beautiful thing we can experience is the
mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
 -- Albert Einstein