pcplantdb

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

Aloha,

Not sure how much detailed comment you want.
I have some different perceptions and/or understandings of Permaculture
than you do, but I doubt that our different understandings will make much
of a difference in the realm of this particular project.
I'll only comment where I think it might really matter for the project.

> For a while now, I’ve dreamt of a concept-mapping authoring tool.  I
> thought that this would be the ideal systems thinking tool, allowing
> users to weave and understand the relationships between phenomena, and
> therefore think in and design systems.

I agree this will be one useful (and very "gee-whiz!" :-) front end for
our information repository.
I don't imagine there is any "ideal" systems thinking tool, since systems
theory itself teaches me otherwise.

> “Central to Permaculture is the concept of guilds.  Guilds may be
> understood as the basic unit of Permaculture,

I would say guilds are an important way of understanding and explaining
our observations of plant interrelations. I would not say they are
"central" (not above and beyond the fundamental principles they
demonstrate, for example), nor would I say they are "the basic unit of
Permaculture."

> Guild design usually
> starts with a tree, and branches outward to include related vegetation in
> concentric rings,

In typical simple book examples, yes, but in the wide world this is too
limited a description.

> “[And here’s the key part of this.]  Similar to the manner in which
> Visual Thesaurus commences with a core word, guilds commence with a core
> element, the tree, as mentioned above.

Not that simple in real world, and, I expect we will be able to deal with
at least some levels of real-world complexity in our project, so not
necessarily a "problem," just an obeservation.

> ...a tree native to their local environment.

A passing thought - see Toby H.'s review of the book critiquing "invasion
biology" in the latest PC Activist...we may have some interesting issues
come up with "native" designations in our DB...




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