pcplantdb

[Bear K <bear@ursine-design.com>]

Super quick addition:
I'll spam harvester proof 'em ( you [at] someplace [dot] com ), so 
don't worry about web exposed email addresses.

I'd also like to say it seemed like a very good event. Met and talked 
with quite a few interesting people. One person (Mark) works with a guy 
(@ onevillage.biz) who has done ecological GIS work in Kenya, etc and 
knows those systems very well. So good overlap with what Lawrence has 
been wanting. I've also seen some of the realtime (on an average 
laptop) earth rendering software that folks are working on, and it is 
truly amazing. Really can give you that sense of scale, and place (B 
Fuller would be proud). The guy from oneVillage really was into being 
able to pare down results to match the biome of the user.

One of the major domains of the PlaNetwork crowd is social networking 
tools. It think there is a good deal of overlap from there to showing 
and making visible the (potential) networks within design elements.

One person quipped during the presentation "so...when you've entered 
and cataloged all 200 million species...". To which I didn't respond 
quickly too. None-the-less, it brings up something about the structure 
of the database. It seems like objects should be able to "inherit" 
properties of their "children" (to put it in hierarchical terms) like 
in OO programming. Only the things that differ from the parent need be 
explicitly noted. A cultivar is the child of this species, has all its 
parents properties, BUT it's height is 2 meters and flower_color is red 
(seed pods are more palatable too). (We can also assume, since it 
inherits from plant, that needs include "CO2, water, nutrients, sun" 
and outputs include "O2, water"....duh..) This really means that you 
don't have to have every, single, individual plant or element cataloged 
to make the system useful. Like a fractal, the general network and 
forms will be visible, adding the additional items will make the system 
richer, and more useful when you're looking at those finer details and 
characteristics of cultivars, etc.

Part of my interest in RDF, OWL, etc is that it seems to be capable of 
describing a system like that.

OK, a few notes from the road. Hope you're all doing well.

Cheers,
Bear