pcplantdb

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

John Schinnerer wrote:

> Did, briefly...couldn't make heads or tails from what was on those web 
> pages.  However your description of intent and application below is very 
> helpful.
>  
Yes. I was heading out and provided little explanation of what I did.
If you want to explore it, try looking at Classes. Then say look at 
Plant. Unfortunately this documentation system "flattens" the whole 
thing, but you can see the parents of the classes (Superclasses) when 
you view a class. Or try individuals and look at Cucurbita_moschata, one 
of a few plants where I tried to describe it with the schema, and 
develop what was lacking.
I've appended this letter with the current subclasses of the ontology. 
It's not fully organized, and would probably end up with parts falling 
into very broad categories (States, Conditions, Organisms, Construction, 
GeographicArea, etc). I worked from the Eden schema, as well as USDA 
Plants, started to add soil classifications from a USDA Soil 
Classification workbook, etc.

> I like it.
> As far as I can make it out at a quick read, you pretty clearly indicate 
> how it would support multiple goals in our project.
> That's good.
> One of those goals is the IMO very important one of providing an 
> extensible framework for "guiding" user input in as structured of ways 
> as we find necessary.
>  
Yes. Matter of fact I was envisioning something like Google Suggest (not 
to jump on the AJAX bandwagon, :-), which could guess what someone was 
typing, and suggest terms in the ontology. There's an OWL property 
called "sameAs", so terms that were the same, but where we use a 
different term, could guide the user saying: "We use this term x instead 
of y, do you feel x conveys what you mean well enough? Otherwise, check 
this box to submit a suggestion for extensions to the schema." Similarly 
unique terms could get placed into a queue to be incorporated into the 
schema, or be assigned a "sameAs" property.

> For what afaik we have said we are trying to do, a wiki is clearly not 
> at all even a little bit suitable.  I thought we'd been through all that 
> already long ago.
>  
Heh. True.

> Am a bit surprised to see wikis mentioned again as anything other than 
> accessory/supporting to the actual plant DB.
>
> There's always a tradeoff between "freedom" and "structure" and wikis 
> are way too "free" for what I have understood we intend to offer.
>  
Yes. While working on the ontology, I realized that it can be very hard 
to convey some things in the detail one might like, often wanting to 
grab a qualifier to stick in there. So I think some form of free text 
entry (which might be more natural to people, then clicking through 100 
item form), but using a structured tagging using a flexible/growing 
ontology behind it which can be accessed by machine, would work 
reasonably. One issue to deal with in that case is how to handle data 
parsed from other sources, since they'd be coming in as text free 
triples, say from USDA Plants, etc.

A nice thing about a relatively small ontology composed of basically 
single or double words, is that translation would be quite quick. Each 
of the classes/individuals would best have a "term" property, the 
English version would often just split words with spaces for nicer text 
output, but someone could translate Construction, Building... into 'de', 
'es', etc, etc.

Here's the class list. Under these live the individuals. Deciding what's 
a class or individual is a bit difficult, but similar to OO programming: 
Classes can have allowed properties defined, whereas the individuals use 
those properties to define themselves.

Construction
       HumanConstruction
           Building
           Container
           Landscape
FoodState
GeographicArea
   Continent
       ContinentalRegion
           GeographicCountry
               GeographicState
                   GeographicCounty
                       PostalCodeZone
   Ecoregion
       Bioregion
   Latitudes
   TerrestrialBiomes
   USDAHardinessZone
Groups
   AnimalGroup
   InsectGroup
   PlantGroup
   SoilGroup
Habitat
   PlantLocations
Organism
   Animal
       Insect
       Mammal
       Reptile
   Bacteria
   Fungi
   Plant
   Protists
PlantPart
Process
   CookingProcess
   CultivationProcess
Product
   AesthicValue
   AgriculturalProduct
   BuildingMaterial
   ChemicalCompound
   Food
   Heat
   HouseholdProduct
   MedicinalProduct
   Nutriet
Property
   EnvironmentProperty
       Climate
       Humidity
       InsolationRate
       Pollution
       Precipitation
       SoilProperty
           SoilClayContent
           SoilConsistency
           SoilDepth
           SoilMoisture
           SoilNitrogen
           SoilOrganicMatter
           SoilPH
           SoilPorosity
           SoilSandContent
           SoilTexture
           SoilWaterLevel
       Tempurature
       Wind
   FoodProperty
       Flavor
   MedicalHazard
   MedicinalProperty
   PlantProperty
       CNRatio
       DayLength
       FirePotential
       FlowerColor
       FlowerConspicuous
       FlowerType
       FoliageColor
       FoliageTexture
       GrowthForm
       GrowthRate
       Habit
       Hardiness
       PlantDuration
       RootDepth
       ShapeAndOrientation
       Toxicity
       TreeCrownForm
       Wildlife
SoilTaxonomy
   Alfisols
   Andisols
   Aridisols
   Entisols
   Histosols
   Inceptisols
   Mollisols
   Oxisols
   Spodosols
   Ultisols
   Vertisols
State
   PlantStage
       FruitStage
       SeedStage
TemporalUnit
   Month
   Phenomilogical
   Season
   Year


Cheers,
Bear