Permaculture Information Web

[Sean Maley <semaley AT yahoo.com>]

Heide,

This is right on with helping the techies organize the
information that could be collected.  You are
absolutly correct that we need to discuss this in
terms of what it's users will understand.

Here is what I am hearing from below:

You have a type of relation: eats, lays eggs, pollen
distributer, seed distributer, etc.

You also have a species:  parsley, butterfly, turnip,
etc.

There is a connection to be made: Papilio polyxenes
larvae eats Carum Petroselinum and adult Vanessa
virginiensis pollenates Helianthus annuus.  There
would need to be modifications to this relation like
stage of maturity, locale, and time of year.

Perhaps we can all brainstorm to list all fundamental
types of species relating, list the pertinant stages
of development, agree on a way to express locale/time
or whatever metric is important.


-Sean.

Table wise I'm seeing three entities: plant, relation,
and relation_type.  relation is a composite of two
dimensions of plant and a dimension of type and has
measures of maturity range, times of year, perhaps
calories/materials exchanged per unit, and more.  Some
measures may need further mormalization, depending on
what we come up with.

--- Heide Hermary <heide.hermary AT gaiacollege.ca>
wrote:

> We could have
> 
> > Relationships
> >     Object related to
> >     Type of relationship: food plant for, etc.
> >     Properties of relationship: might want to add
> additional info
> >         here
> >
> > And build a list of the types of posible
> relationships.
> 
> Here are some of the types of relationships I think
> you are referring to:
> 
>     * Mutualism: Food / Food  - Food / Propagation -
> Food / Defense
>     * Competition
>     * Parasitism
>     * Predation
> 
> These, however, are just between two organisms. 
> When you talk about 
> "guilds" we need to refer back to my previous
> example about the 
> relationship between the plant that feeds byt
> butterfly larvae, and the 
> plants that feed the butterfly adult. The plants
> themselves have no 
> relationship to each other, but certainly are
> required for the 
> functioning of the "guild" or ecosystem. Similarly
> complex relationships 
> exist between thousands of organisms within the soil
> environment and 
> within various sizes of ecosystems.
> 
> I've thought about this a lot and finally decided
> not to worry about 
> categories, but to describe the relationships.  Too
> much is lost by 
> trying to fit organisms and dynamic relationships
> into tight little 
> boxes.  That's not how life works.  And that's why
> we don't have much 
> easily accessible information on exactly these
> things.  Which is the 
> reason for developing this database in the first
> place.  So let's not 
> condemn it to superficiality right from the start.
> 
> Unfortunately I have absolutely no idea what the
> techies are talking 
> about. PLEASE allow for plain text entry into these
> fields!!  Our 
> database is based on Wiki technology and actually
> works very well.  I am 
> sure this can be integrated with other stuff.  We'd
> be happy to share it 
> with you to stimulate the though process if that
> would be helpful.  It's 
> definitely far from perfect, but also definitely on
> the right track.
> 
> Cheers, Heide
> 
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> piw mailing list
> piw AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/piw
> 


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