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  • From: Richard Morris <webmaster AT pfaf.org>
  • To: Permaculture Information Web <piw AT lists.ibiblio.org>, PCPLANTDB <pcplantdb AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Cc:
  • Subject: Re: [piw] Q2: what criteria do we want to record for plants.
  • Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2005 11:32:27 +0000

Heide Hermary 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.

A solution I've though of to the Guild question is to treat a guild
as a seperate object or page in the database.

You can then have a relationship between a plant and the guild. And have some text in the Guild page describing the relationship in more depth.

One example of this is the "White Oak Guild" which I gleaned from Toby Hemingways work.
http://www.ibiblio.org/pfaf/pcplantdb/showthing.php?BOTNAME=White+Oak%2FHazelnut+community

Currently we are lacking on much data about guilds, this is the only example I've been able to find.

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.

Agreed. This is a good case for keeping the DB loosly structured
so we can allow for a lot of flexability.

Categories do have their uses. Computers love them! It can make for easier searching, i.e. you can search for a particular category.
There is a problem with the same thing being described in two
different ways, using two different labels.

Unfortunately I have absolutely no idea what the techies are talking about. PLEASE allow for plain text entry into these fields!!

What you can have is a list of exsisting relationships, say a drop down list. But also allow for a new type of relationship to be added in a text field.

> 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.

I'd love to see the database you've put together.

Rich






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