pcplantdb

[Richard Archer <pcplantdb@juggernaut.com.au>]

At 1:44 PM -0500 25/8/04, Chad Knepp wrote:

>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.

If we're eventually going to be using this database to identify
potential guilds, then the more information stored about each plant
the better. And when I say "guild" I use the term very loosely.
What I really mean is the ability to use this database to find
a group of plants (or things) that don't have conflicting demands
and in which each element supplies some of the needs of other
elements in the group.

Finding groups of things (including plants, animals, insects,
structures and even processes) which work together in this way
is a fundamental aspect of permaculture, so any information we
can store which helps in this task would be useful.


Which leads to:

>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)"?

The concept of external relationships strikes me as being pretty open
ended. For example, every plant which can be a nitrogen fixer has an
implied relationship with every plant which is a nitrogen consumer.
It would not be desirable to require that every such potential
relationship be explicitly defined in the "relationships" table in
order that this relationship be used to identify a guild.

Instead the attributes of the objects (i.e. nitrogen fixing vs
nitrogen consuming) can be used to identify this relationship.

So it follows that I think it would be best to expand the list of
attributes stored about each object so that these relationships can
be determined procedurally from the data set.

Perhaps storing a description of relationships between specific
objects would be a useful thing in that it allows the entire data
set to be scanned to find other similar relationships which occur
between other objects.

But at the end of the day I think the end user will need to be able
to define how they want to analyse the data to find relationships.
And then it's going to be the quality and breadth of information
stored about each object that will really make this database useful.


>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?

This raises an interesting point, which Lawrence with his experience
with wikis might be able to shed some light on.

What happens if someone enters some data, for example plant X grows to
height 10 metres in locality A. Someone else then comes along and
enters that plant X grows to 15 metres in locality B.

Does the initial data get overwritten? Is there some meaningful way
of storing and using both data points? Do we just look at which author
has the highest reputation and discard the other author's data?
If the second author's data gets discarded then how does their reputation
ever increase?

 ...R.