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  • From: Heide Hermary <heide.hermary AT gaiacollege.ca>
  • To: Permaculture Information Web <piw AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [piw] Q2: what criteria do we want to record for plants.
  • Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2005 07:14:09 -0800

Richard, I will e-mail you separately to get in touch so you can get access to our database.

Other comments within your text below:

Richard Morris wrote:

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.

Actually, the way I see it this is exactly what the diverse data entered into the database will CREATE upon a SEARCH. Some of the information you refer to as "guild" is available as "ecosystem" information: such as the Garry Oak Ecosystem, the Cedar-Maple Ecosystem (where I live), etc.etc. But this only refers to native habitat, not to food plants (except the wild ancestors of our food plants, but I doubt many of our cultivated varieties would survice in that habitat any more). Also, plants usually belong to many different ecosystems, as there is seldom an abrupt change in nature but a gradual interphase.


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.

I think you are looking too narrow. You (we) are trying to portray very complex relationships, AND we don't even know what they are. So boxing them in at this point is trying to fit nature into our limited perception of how we thinks she works. That's the BIG problem with conventional databases, which limits their usefulness and makes them obsolete so quickly.

We want to invite all the concerned people out there to contribute their knowledge about these plants and ecosystems, and many years from now, when we do a search for a particular plant, we will find a wealth of information that allows us to make ecologically sound decisions in our area, and for our application.

I think you need look totally beyond the idea of a normal database. Maybe the place to start from is the search. I don't know what the current state of the technology is, but I will e-mail you separately about that too.

Cheers, Heide






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