pcplantdb

[Richard Morris <webmaster@pfaf.org>]

Hi All,
	As part of my PGCE I've had to write a bit about the projects I'm 
involved with. I though I'd post it here for your enjoyment.

Rich

I'm a founding member of this project which is attempting to build a 
collaborative framework for plant information and Permaculture 
(Permaculture stands for permanent agriculture and is a broad term 
encompassing many new ideas on sustainable methods of agriculture). 
There are about seven core people involved from across the globe as well 
as a number of others on the sidelines.

The project was first discussed on a mailing list two or three years 
ago. It remained a vague set of ideas for over a year until June last 
year when we heard that we had attracted $10K funding from the Threshold 
Foundation.

The funding has started a process of turning a set of wild ideas into a 
working project. and some of the money has gone to funding core 
development time. Much of the work has revolved around how we actually 
organize ourselves, it is easy to exchange ideas on a website but quite 
another to agree on decisions and begin implementing. To date we have:
- Established the website at www.permaculture.info,
- Produced a graphical design for the website
- Developed the core infrastructure for the technical side of the
  project.
- Established an issue tracker to track bugs in software and provide
  infrastructure for managing the development process. Esentially this
  offers a more structured means of communication than a mailing list.
- Established a wiki: this is a collaborative tool for working on the
  specification and other documents needed for the project.
- Started on developing the formal specification for the project
  describing in detail the aims and objective of the project, milestones
  etc.
- Started talks of collaboration with various groups including the
  Permaculture Association UK, Heide Hermary at Gaia College
  http://www.gaiacollege.ca Thomas Naegele who has provided the TANPLANT
  data on the Edible and Medicinal Plants of the Great Lakes.
- Exchanged nearly 3,000 emails!

There is still much to be done:
- Complete the specification, in particular the parts relating to
  organizing the data (Schema)
- Develop the core infrastructure to allow user contributions
- Build more collaborations and import more data.
- Express data in format suitable for machine reading through the
  semantic web (XML dialects).
- Publicly announce the project when is has reached a suitable level of
  maturity.
- Develop a Rich Client interface which will allow a graphical view of
  the data and could serve as a design tool.

In many ways the development of this project have mirrored my 
development in the PGCE, building the specifications bares relation to 
devising a schema of work or lesson plan with a clear statement of aims 
and objects. We hopefully all learnt something about interpersonal 
communications (even with the limitations of email). Overall 
representing a shift towards a more professional approach which seems to 
be producing benefits.

My personal role in the project has been minimal and surprisingly I've 
not written a line of code to date. Instead I've working on thing like 
specifications and schema issues. This marks a significant change for my 
role in the project and has been a good learning experience for me to 
know that things can move forward without me having to do all the 
programming.

One interesting side line for me has been thinking about the semantic 
web which is a direction in which the web may develop. Here rather than 
the traditional web page which is focused on presentation the semantic 
web focuses on adding meaning in a machine readable fashion to web 
pages, through the use of mark up. Potentially it could be possible to 
build application like an general semantic web graphing program which 
would allow any data on the web to be graphed. This could a great 
educational tool allowing students to easily produce graphs of the 
populations of countries or the weights of chemical elements.