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Subject: Permaculture Information Web
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- From: Heide Hermary <heide.hermary AT gaiacollege.ca>
- To: Permaculture Information Web <piw AT lists.ibiblio.org>
- Subject: Re: [piw] relationships implementation
- Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2005 14:16:41 -0800
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Sean Maley wrote: What does relationship mean? In the nitrogen fixing situations the bacteria capture nitrogen gas from the air in the soil and transform it - either within or on the immedite surface of - the plant root in exchange for carbon compounds. This is a direct and deliberate trade association. Other nitrogen fixing bacteria just live in the soil, and I am not aware of any having such direct relationships with plants. So personally I would call that relationship a food / food trade or exchange rather than "nitrogen fixing". Of course there any many different types of food / food relationships, and maybe one of them would be called "nitrogen fixing". What, then would you call mycorrhizae? I don't know the answer of course, somehow we need to come to terms with the complexityI have been envisioning "relationships" to mean between one or more organisms, rather than "nitrogen fixing" and the sort. For one, "nitrogen fixing" is a type of relationship, not a relationship. Yes, that would be in immense piece of work, of course only possible through cooperation by many, many people across the world and with many different areas of expertiseI database of relationships between all species to all other species would be sizable, but possible. However, all species to all species to all types to compound relations involving more than two species will be mighty big. I imagine this to be one of the fundamentals about what the project could provide to the community. Who knows? I don't think anything of this nature has ever been attempted. And maybe it is way beyond what everybody else envisions.How many species would be involved in the most complex relationships? How many relationship types would be needed to encompass the whole picture? Actually it does and it doesn't. It would capture it in plain text format, but I find that our students don't think in those terms, even if they think they do. My personal feeling is that this simple human-centered mindset is at the root of our current ecological problems, but then who knows.How does your current database capture this information? Cheers, Heide Wiki technology is absolutely fantastic for creating immediate and meaningful links. My dream database would be one that is dynamic like Wikis, yet more structured in that it looks for specific type of information. Sorry, I have zero understanding of the technical aspects. Cheers, Heide -Sean. --- Heide Hermary <heide.hermary AT gaiacollege.ca> wrote: |
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[piw] relationships implementation,
Chad Knepp, 03/22/2005
- Re: [piw] relationships implementation, Heide Hermary, 03/22/2005
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Message not available
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[piw] Re: [pcplantdb] relationships implementation,
Chad Knepp, 03/25/2005
- Re: [piw] Re: [pcplantdb] relationships implementation, Richard Morris, 03/26/2005
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[piw] Re: [pcplantdb] relationships implementation,
Chad Knepp, 03/25/2005
- <Possible follow-up(s)>
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Re: [piw] relationships implementation,
Sean Maley, 03/23/2005
- Re: [piw] relationships implementation, Heide Hermary, 03/23/2005
- Re: [piw] relationships implementation, Stephanie Gerson, 03/29/2005
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