pcplantdb

[Chad Knepp <pyg@galatea.org>]

Lawrence F. London, Jr. writes:
 > Richard Morris wrote:
 > 
 >  >  In particular the Annotea
 >  >
 >  >> project <http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea/> part of w3c's semantic web
 >  >> stuff <http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/> looks interesting.
 >  >
 >  > Now annotation is kind of cool for our purposes. We might want to
 >  > annotate content in various ways.
 >  > Here content could be:
 >  >     the information about a plant
 >  >     an article (say someones opion piece on self-willed land)
 >  >     other media (photos, sound, movies)
 >  > And the annotation could be
 >  >     a comment about the content
 >  >     a rating for how good the content is
 >  >     author info (?)
 >  >
 >  > A standard class for annotation could be a good idea?
 >  >
 >  > Currently the pfaf site could be seen to follow a
 >  > content-annotation scheme. In that none of the content can be
 >  > changed, but users are able to add anotation (comments) to most
 >  > of the content (basically static web pages and plant database
 >  > pages).

Responding to Rich here:

I actually thought this was interesting more from the perspective that
it used a dedicated client for authoring not just a text box in a
browser.  One of the clients is based on Mozilla (Annozilla sp?).
We've previously discussed the importance of comments.

 > One distince benefit of a relationships database or CMS is serving
 > as a whiteboard for users/developers - a way to record stray
 > thoughts, ideas, concepts and assorted bits of data to be
 > reassembled at some future time in an organized or semi-organized
 > way to illustrate some new concept.  I have lots of snippets of ,
 > to me, really valuable pieces of information or pieces of the
 > puzzle, as it were, that I have on my computer or in collections
 > online, that are gard to keep track of - I read something
 > interesting and notice a connection to a piece of data I archived 8
 > years ago, _somewhere_, and want to reread it. Where is it? Good
 > idea to allow users some space in HG to brainstorm and keep notes
 > and be able to link to this area from comments they add to
 > records. Their brainstorm area (BS) could be considered a
 > miniproject-in-development and linked to by other users for
 > whatever purpose.  Wikis do this, especially TikiWiki, as a CMS.

Yes, this is my own need as well.  I make notes on paper about things
I've done that I usually lose before I manage to organize or need
again.  You may recall one of my personal goals is to create a *garden
notebook* type of thing that is a way to record more personal data
while at the same time providing the handy tie-ins to the rest of the
data set.  This information could be private but I think it would make
more sense to leave it public and restrict authorship to the
individual.  

In a less focused way, I hope HG will both accommodate and encourage a
lot of brainstorming.  Even if a given thought is not perfect in it's
initial incarnation, the collaborative feedback from others will
refine it.  I think it is fine to have wrong and missing information
so long as there is an obvious path to getting it correct.

 > Relationships appear in different contexts:
 > 
 > 1) within guilds (mixed organisms, i.e. snails + clematis)
 > 2) communities (one organism, many communities)
 > 3) within stacked functions
 > 4) within the major/macro components of a pc system or within or
 > between pc zones, climate
 > 5) within micro systems, i.e. soil environment: mammals, birds,
 > reptiles, invertibrates, insects, microorganisms; bacteria, fungi,
 > arthropods, actinomycetes, protozoa, nematodes, prokaryotes,
 > eukaryotes, viruses, as well as the soil profile and makeup,
 > enzymes, macro and micronutrients, CEC, pH, OM content

And there are a lot of different kinds of relationships in a range
from positive to antagonistic; many of them subtle.

 > HG, as a way of teaching or illustrating ideas and concepts, could
 > provide galaxies of external links to outside educational
 > resources.  This would assist and encourage users who submit
 > resources to the database. Of course these links would be part of
 > the database.  This is something I am curious about: what
 > proportion of the total body of information made available by HG
 > would be non-HG proprietary resources gleaned from outside sources?

Yes, I can see permaculture.info serving a portal function.