pcplantdb

[Bear Kaufmann <bear@ursine-design.com>]

Hi all,

Here are a few updates to what I've been doing.
I've been working on an ontology for PIW in RDF-OWL.
I've been using Protege to do it. The output is a little less then human 
readable but it's here:
http://www.permaculture.info/doc/piwontv0.1.rdf-xml.owl
Which you could open in an RDF/OWL editor/reader application, like 
Protege or others.
I've also output it into a more human-readable format here:
http://www.permaculture.info/doc/PIWOntDoc/
It seems like a few of the pages are missing, but you'll get the idea.

It's been an interesting learning experience developing the ontology. 
It's far from complete or as expressive as it could be. Take at the 
'individual' Cucurbita_moschata to see the start of actually trying to 
apply the terms to a plant.

I've also found a number of Python and PHP frameworks to handle creation 
of RDF data based on ontologies. pOWL is actually quite nice.
http://powl.sourceforge.net/

I've also experimented with the MapServer CGI to be able to show the 
plant range. Still have a bit to work on there. It also would require 
parsing out the current varchar field into the actual regions and 
countries described (not to mention the geo-relational smarts to figure 
out what 'South Asia to Europe' means), but I've started experimenting 
with it (primarily at the country level, with a country shapefile, and 
fields describing the region a country is in).  The mapserver CGI is 
actually surprisingly responsive, which is nice. Unfortunately, I don't 
have any images to show.

Hope this finds you all well.

I'll be out of town for a few days starting tomorrow.

Cheers,
Bear