Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

pcplantdb - [pcplantdb] Re: Teething - from PIW to the PCPDB list...

pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: pcplantdb

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Bear K <bear@ursine-design.com>
  • To: Permaculture Plant Database <pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [pcplantdb] Re: Teething - from PIW to the PCPDB list...
  • Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 09:53:15 -0800

However, and this is FYI only, not a criticism - I just did my first search for "Grevillea". It returned 370 matches for 'grevillea' but only one of them was a Grevillea [G. robusta]. There were a few others in the family Proteaceae but the rest were nothing to do with Grevilleas and weren't sorted alphabetically.

Then I searched "Apple Mint" and it returned 162 matches for 'apple mint'. I got lots of mints, apples, pineapples, Mentha species, Labiatae (now Lamiaceae) and Rosaceae families, fair enough, but about half maybe two-thirds the way through the list, Chives (Allium schoenophrasum) showed up, then lots of clovers (Trifolium spp. family Leguminosae now Fabaceae), after that were nothing to do with mint, apples or pineapples, and not sorted alphabetically.

Is this normal? I don't know if it matters to most people, especially non-horties, but I for one do not have enough internet time available to scroll hundreds of matches. Or maybe this is returning compatible/guild species as well?

Is this a caused by the typo matching algorithm? I've noticed quite a few search results with the search term within the latin name, etc. Is it possible to try turning the feature off, and see what results come of it? Would it be possible to add a dictionary table, split the full text enteries into words, and store those words (larger then 3 characters) in that table, then run the algorithm against that. If the results from unsplit search terms return less then 5 or so results, ask the user "Did you mean ......?" with the highest ranking match. A la Google.

OK, googled it, the Levenshtein distance....http://us4.php.net/manual/en/function.levenshtein.php

Also when/how can we start adding our own species? Are we going to be able to upload any photos?

Cheers,
Bear





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page