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pcplantdb - Re: [pcplantdb] attributes

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  • From: Chad Knepp <pyg@galatea.org>
  • To: pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] attributes
  • Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 13:44:20 -0500

Well that was a fun tangent and I can see that we have some pretty
sharp/experienced PC folks involved in this project. I myself don't
have near the level of knowledge/experience in PC that y'all do.
Fortunately that's not my primary role in this group.

One of the things that is a little confusing to me anyway is the
seperation between implementation and function. I think the
information I'm looking for is what should HG do and specifically I
was wondering what kind of information should we know about plants.
How this information is implemented in HG is not necessary and a bit
confusing. So far we have three major categories of plant information
Name, Culture, and Uses (and possibly Identification). Remember that
relationships with other things is information contained outside the
plant itself. In this light Uses becomes a bit fuzzy because a lot of
uses are really relationships with other elements. Anyway, lets do
this again. Maybe a good way to think about this is, if you wanted to
know everything important about a plant what would that consist of.

LS = locale specific; things that will vary depending on climate
region.

Name sorts of thing:

o Family
o Genus
o Species
o Subspecies
o Variety
o Common names (LS)
o Author
o Synonyms

Notes: I actually don't think that name is very helpful information
except for locating plants that you know the name of. The one
exception to this is that I have found it interesting to look at
other plants in the same genus and same family that may be better
adapted to my climate or have otherwise desirable characteristics.

Rich you suggested adding a Family Author... I didn't even know
there where authors for families. How/when would we use this or
need to know it? I even question how important the genus species
author is... Also you mentioned about including a higher level in
the whole taxonomy scheme. Also tell me what we really need to
capture all the ssp/variety/forma/etc stuff below genus species... I
had previously thought that ssp/variety would do it all.

Cultural details

o Hardy to tempature
o Frost free days / required growing season
o Life cycle - [bi|per]annual (LS)
o Growth habit
o Growth rate or growth per year
o Max height (LS)
o Max height at 20 years (LS)
o Max width (LS)
o Preferred
Soil types
Ph range
Fertility range
Soil moisture range
Annual moisture range
Shade range
o Tolerates adverse (conditions)
o Flower type
o Months in leaf (LS)
o Months in flower (LS)
o Pollinators
o Cultivations details (LS)
o Propagation details (LS)
o Cultivars and notes (LS)

Cultural details from usda. Should all these be included as well?

o active_growth_period (LS)
o after_harvest_regrowth_rate
o alleopath
o bloat
o CN_ratio
o fall_conspicuous (LS)
o flower_color
o flower_conspicous
o foliage_color
o foliage_porosity_summer
o foliage_porosit_winter (LS)
o foliage_texture
o fruit_seed_color
o fruit_seed_conspicuos
o leaf_retention (LS)
o lifespan (LS)
o nitrogen_fixer
o resprout_ability
o plant_density_min (LS)
o plant_density_max (LS)
o precipitation_min
o precipitation_max
o root_depth_min
o bloom_period
o fruit_seed_abundance
o fruit_seed_begin (LS)
o fruit_seed_end (LS)
o fruit_seed_persist (LS)
o seeds_pound (LS)
o seed_spread_rate (LS)
o seedling_vigor
o vegatative_spread_rate (LS)

Uses:

o Use details (LS)
o Hazards (LS)

> >
> > How do people feel about preserving reference information (links
> > to books)... and/or references to other sites?
> >
> Absolutly. References are v important for checking acuracy of data.
> Could posibly put into a separate page so its there but not
> cluttering the display.

The thing about references is that most of our authorship from this
point forth will not be accompanied references other than an allusion
to personal experience. I also do not find a reference to a book I do
not own to be particularly helpful in anyway. Online references could
be helpful in the way you suggest, but I think that peer reputation
will be the most widely used mechanism of ensuring authority. I'm ok
including references, but I suspect they will be unused. What do
other folks think?

Since it seems like a hot topic, I have some questions about
relationships as well. Are there a finite number of
relationships?... for example would 1000 different kinds of
relationships between elements adequately describe things... 100, 500,
2000? Would these relationships be one word, several words, a
paragraph, or what? Also if their are a finite number of Relationsips
is a relationship in our system adequately expressed as "(one or more
elements) has/have 'Relationship' with (one or more elements)"?

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




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