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pcplantdb - Relationships database + feayures and functions [Was: Re: [pcplantdb] The wiki link]

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  • From: Chad Knepp <pyg@galatea.org>
  • To: pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Relationships database + feayures and functions [Was: Re: [pcplantdb] The wiki link]
  • Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2004 21:06:06 -0500

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.




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