pcplantdb

[Chad Knepp <pyg@galatea.org>]

Scott Pittman writes:
 > I like all of the things listed in both db's but the thing that was 
 > glaringly missing was ""guilds"" which is why I thought this grant was 
 > written!  Guild information will have to be solicited from all over the 
 > world, and will take time.

You are correct.  It is missing because guilds will be implemented as
'relationships' which are seperate objects from plants with their
own attributes.  Basically a relationship object will consist of other
objects such as plants and animals and some indicator of their
relationship.  A guild will probably be a collection of relationships
objects instead of one large and complex relationship.  One of the
advatages of this implementation is that we will be able to 'guess' at
likely guilds by simply following the relationship paths to other
elements.  This is the Graph Based Interface (GBI) stuff we talk
about.  It also allows for a more dynamic guild definition that can be
automagically adjusted for things like climate... substituting
elements more appropriate for a specific locale so someone in southern
California creating a peach guild gets a different result than someone
in western Michigan.

 > I think we should have as much information as possible on the plant 
 > guilds around a given species in its original habitat, ie apricots in 
 > Persia, and then the information on analog guilds in various regions as 
 > developed by individuals or evolved on their own.
 > 
 > A lot of this work has been done with such people as Vavilov, but it was 
 > incidental to the research they were doing and the results are sketchy.  
 > Which means a lot of research into the botanical literature.

Our goal is to make a tool that makes both doing this possible and
worthwhile in the sense that it is capable of producing meaningful
results with the information entered.

-- 
Chad Knepp
python -c 'import base64;print base64.decodestring("cHlnQGdhbGF0ZWEub3Jn")'