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pcplantdb - Re: [pcplantdb] relationships implementation

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  • From: Bear Kaufmann <bear@ursine-design.com>
  • To: Permaculture Plant Database <pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] relationships implementation
  • Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 19:16:29 -0800

o How is a relationship different from a natural plant community?
Links and nodes. In a graph theory way of looking at it
a natural plant community is a 'node' and relationships are 'links' to
and from that node.
It seems if one viewed a plant community as a node you'd be looking at one system level up from the ecological relationships within that node. But yes, technically, you'd need to say this, this, and this are part of the guild/community.

o Should relationships be owned? editable? moderateable?

Assuming that the relationship was part of a comment. Then it would
have the have the same owership and permisions as the comment.

In the past I've played with having everything with an owner.
I'd also be inclined to try to have relationships, comments, etc be a subclass of one primary object type. Comments have some specific forms of relationships to objects and other comments (always a tree form, no network). The superclass has owner data, source?, date stamp, handles relationships, outputs the object for full text search table(?), etc.

I don't know if this is exactly how it's setup now, or if this is something a later release.

Also, how are references handled right now? Does the ref list at the bottom get created on the fly or is in in the text-blob already? I'd be inclined to allow a source reference relationship at some point....
(People could enter the number/letter as they are now [32] into a field, plus a link to pop up a key to sources...)

Something else to add to the pot...(not to overwhelm our programmer.. :-) Let me know if I should be quiet Chad.. :-)

There's the concept of faceted searching, which seems like an interesting technique, which would be helpful in searching for guild members...

Basically....Look over all the objects in the DB, and find the range of properties that they have.
List the available search criteria from that range (n-fixer, bog, sun, shade, high ph, low ph, Asteraceae, etc, etc)....clicking one searches the DB against that criteria...

Look over the returned objects for the range of properties that they have...and list the criteria....
And on it goes...

The cool thing is it shows what's available and doesn't lead to dead ends...
If you choose n-fixer....suddenly, the families available drops way down...
If you choose bog, suddenly you find that sedges and rushes are there...look at the medicinal properties available from a bog...no fruit producers, but hey, corms! (semi-educated description here).

It's probably a good bit of work to implement, but seems a handy way to look at the data...

Here's an implementation of the concept:
http://www.siderean.com/delicious/ facetious.jsp?tn=0subject&tv=plant&ss=1

Cheers,
Bear





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