pcplantdb

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>]

Chad Knepp wrote:

>  > Instead the attributes of the objects (i.e. nitrogen fixing vs
>  > nitrogen consuming) can be used to identify this relationship.
>
> Yeah, nitrogen is tricky because it could be defined as an attribute
> or a relationship.  At this point I think it would be best to have it
> as an attribute and imply relationships from it.

If you needed to build a number of guilds with some different from others
and they all contained the n2fixer azotobacter.x (just say there was a 
specific variety
that dominated other n2 fixers on your land) and you needed to find all 
legumes listed in the db that
utilized this specific bacteria so you could pick a variety of legumes for 
your guilds.
I suppose you could have a record for each variety of azotobacter as well as 
each of the n2fixers themselves that exist.

>  > 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.
>
> Although this is moving into implementation details I'm planning on
> allowing methods to define element sets, so it would really be pretty
> easy to say (every nitrogen fixing plant) has a relationship of
> 'providing nitrogen' to (all plants) or some such... although this
> isn't the best example.  Better one would be (every Brassica) or
> (every Tree with Dappled Foilage), etc...
>
>  > 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.
>
> One of the reasons I was asking about defining relationships is
> because limiting them to a set makes them more searchable.  Another
> idea I've had is to allow as much detail as desired to define the
> relationship but also give it some broader classification for
> scanning. 

--
L.F.London
lfl@intrex.net
http://market-farming.com
http://www.ibiblio.org/ecolandtech