pcplantdb

[Stephanie Gerson <sgerson@stanfordalumni.org>]

obvious question (sorry folks, I can't help it) - how does nature do it?



------ Original Message ------
Received: 09:53 AM PST, 01/24/2005
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...

> 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

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+++++++++++++++
Stephanie Gerson
sgerson@stanfordalumni.org
(c) 415.871.5683


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