pcplantdb

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>]

Firstly, take a break and have a look at this:

 Hubble Space Telescope Images
 - with musical sound track

<http://hytaipan.home.comcast.net/hubble640.html>

This is beyond amazing.....

Life changing..

-><><-

Bear Kaufmann wrote:

> Sorry, some of these discussions occurred off list.
> I went through the process of dividing all of the comments in the PIW 
> dataset into individual words. Each word is also identified with the 
> plant it was used on. From this, we can do a number of interesting things.
>
> Here are the most common words in the dataset (top 3,000 out of 16,000):
> http://permaculture.info/test/most_common_words.html
>
> We can find what words co-occur often (appear within the same plant 
> description together):
> http://permaculture.info/test/related_words.php

Would it be possible or useful to make this info available to PIW database 
users?
It might help jog their minds to come up with more creative search strings or
to think out of the box.

> If you search for 'woven' in the related words, you'll see a reasonable 
> example.
> It includes: layers thatch chairs insulating nappies sheets blankets
> 'Ice' includes: cream sweets creams canada spearmint
> 'Fronds' includes: ferns spores carcinogens humid fern plantlets bracken
> 'Stronger' includes: oregano savory onions crispum hortensis pepo 
> pumpkins affecting beet chamomile curly digitalis dogs gutta-percha 
> moles onion marjoram marrows.
>
> You can also apply something similar to what google does when you use 
> 'find similar' on a page:
> http://permaculture.info/test/related_Abutilon_vitifolium.html
> http://permaculture.info/test/related_Abelmoschus_esculentus.html
> http://permaculture.info/test/related_Acer_crataegifolium.html
>
> Note that none of the above results had anything to do with the name of 
> the plant, only the shared words. The shared words appear below the 
> plant name.
>
> All of this is non-semantic, meaning that "not edible" and "edible", 
> both match edible. "not eaten by squirrels" gets 3 hits for "eaten by 
> squirrels". But you still get interesting results.

I can see how even this sort of result could be useful to those performing 
complex data searches.

Back to months ago:

The plant (& animal, etc.) relationships thing. Just doing a Google Scholar 
search on something
even remotely permaculture-related shows just how much information, most of a 
scientific nature,
is useful and applicable to permaculture and especially the study of 
permaculture relationships
even guild design, especially that, as it is such a robust tool for those designing and implementing ermaculture 
systems, say on a farm, a park, building grounds, homes, etc etc. That's where the rubber hits the road.
Or better said, that's how the PIW juggernaut grips the terrain.

Speaking of biomimicry, here's a book on the subject:

http://www.greenbiz.com/reference/bookstore_record.cfm?LinkAdvID=72
Bookstore
Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature
by Janine M. Benyus
Hardcover Price: $25.00 (Our Price: $17.50)
Biomimicry is a revolutionary new science that analyzes nature's best ideas -- spider silk and eyes, seashells and brain 
cells, photosynthesis and DNA -- and adapts them for human use. Janine Benyus takes us into the lab and out in the field 
with the maverick researchers who are discovering nature's ingenious solutions to the problem of human survival: 
studying leaves to learn how to make microscopic solar "power packs" that will clean up toxic spills and light our 
homes; harnessing DNA's coding power to make blindingly fast computers; discovering miracle drugs by observing what 
animals eat; and much more.

>-<

Taking  note of:
"discovering nature's ingenious solutions to the problem of human survival"

PIW could play an integral and very important role in our survival. And 
that's an understatement.

> I'm also right now working on something using google: getting the number 
> of hits each plant has on the web. Right now Aloe vera is the clear 
> winner, but I've only done genuses from A-C, since I don't want to 
> overwhelm google's servers. Second highest currently is a model species 

> for plant biology, then food crops, herbs, and ornamentals. I'm curious 
> what the differences between google general and google scholar would 
> show. Those plants with low scores generally place PFAF and PIW as the 
> top hits.

I had a look at Google Scholar and got totally sidetracked. GS, like Google, 
is almost limitless
and is lightning fast. I searched for rhizosphere and got 10 pages of hits. 
Picked one of them and it offered
1599 more references on rhizosphere. One of these was astounding so I 
forwarded it to the pc list -
research that demonstrated that innoculation of P limited soils (added rock 
phosphate and/or indigenous P)
with a certain combination of rhizobacteria and AM's (arbuscular micorrhizae) 
led to a greater uptake of P
by plants resulting in more robust growth. The previous rhizosphere search 
results led me to lots of
references on the effects of CO2 on plant growth:
"Plant responses to atmospheric CO2 enrichment with emphasis on roots and the 
rhizosphere"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15091762&dopt=Citation
There's  lot of meat in these Google search results and as the above reference says, there may be more to come from the 
research described there. So valuable resources once linked to could have a hook or flag added to indicate that future 
searches for C02 and the rhizosphere should return to that source to check for updates as opposed to indicating that
said source has only its original data.

If PIW is to become the world's PermaGoogle
or PermaScholar then, with your text analysis experiments in mind, how can 
your work lead to
a more refined structure for database queries as well a more robust, diverse 
and refined array of datasets
to include in searches, i.e. external searches of existing data sources out 
on the Web, things like the various archives
of mailing lists, yours, mine, Fukuoka-Farming, EM-Ag, Biodynamics, Compost Tea, sanet-mg and more. Could PIW do a 
Google Scholar search transparently?

PIW becoming the Google of PC is an exciting idea. Taken seriously and taking small steps at first this could become a 
reality. I keep reading how XML is allowing industry and corporations to put their in house information out for
other entities to develop their own means for retrieving, analysing and 
presenting it. Put many data sources together
through implementations of XML applications and you have a very robust information system for researchers and 
practitioners to use.

I have gotten involved in learning about and using machine shop equipment (I 
want to make innovative hand tools for
permaculturists, homesteaders, gardeners and farmers and potentially to fill 
needs 3rd world countries may have for
appropriate technology solutions bring back the scythe and how and stop using herbicides and pesticides - maybe I should 
look to biomimicry for design ideas :-)). If an XML "info system, or database" could corral all known resources for 
machinists for delivery via a onestopshopping system this would be a real boon. I can think of many machinist forum 
archives that could be combined and searched together with publically-accessable resources many industrial corporations 
make readily available to whomever needs them.

More later ......

LL