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pcplantdb - Re: [pcplantdb] attributes

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  • From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>
  • To: pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] attributes
  • Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 20:13:59 -0700

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




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