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  • From: Plants For A Future <webmaster@pfaf.org>
  • To: Permaculture Plant Database <pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] Raining Delectable Bruschettas
  • Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2005 21:58:10 +0000 (GMT)

On Wed, 9 Feb 2005, Bear K wrote:

Actually more about this thread:
Benifical relationships
[snip]
May I suggest that this simply be "Relationships", which can then include antipathetic/allelpathic information.
For me this relationship information (+, o and -) is usually the hardest to come by, and most crucial.
Indeed this does seem like a good way to simplify the design.
It's really about defining a schema for relationships. It uses so called "triples".
Subject:predicate:Object

Even data fields are considered a relationship.
User2300:firstName:Bear

Ladybug:eats:Aphid
If a relationship is bi-directional, we can assume Aphid:isEatenBy:Aphid

For a primer see here: http://xulplanet.com/tutorials/mozsdk/rdfstart.php

I imagine that there probably are a reasonable number of DB's with eats/isEasten type relationships being built by ecologists already.

Yep tripples are good. At this stage its thats all we need!

Subject:Verb:Object
(just to be dificult we could allow for adverbs, giving characteristics
to the verb, so giving a quartet Subject:Verb(+adverb):Object



Rich wrote, “It does open up some interesting technical Q's, on how to
merge two databases. I suspect this is the sort of thing we will have to
deal with in the future, so now would be a great time to explore the
problems of integrations.”
One thing with RDF is you can overlap schemas. So there's already a definition for personal information: http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/
There are other projects using RDF for biology and botanical purposes. If there is something that's an agreed upon schema for a plant naming system, we might decide to use that spec for that. If other projects use that too, we'd start to speek the same language, and could compare notes (merge/xreference) more easily on things each others domains did or didn't cover.

Sounds good, if we can find existing schema/ontologies etc
then it could be good. Could be a big research effort.

A man Steph and I meet at the Planetwork meeting said he had interest in the project, and has experience in developing schemas with RDF. He's used Protege to develop with. Find it here: http://protege.stanford.edu/ It's something that I looked at before he mentioned it. I believe it has a collaborate checkin/checkout system to develop with, and editing the schema with data using it doesn't corrupt the info. We might want to talk with him some more. Drawing up this XML DTD/Schema/RDF/etc agnostic description is very good, we could send to to him and see what he thinks.

Yep Protege seems good. Good comunity, fancy playing with it?

Rich


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