To: permaculture <permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: plant DB
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2001 19:16:50 +0000
> From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lflondon@mindspring.com>
> > Toby Heminingway
> >As I've followed this thread, my leaning has been that the PFAF DB does
> >most
> >of what is done by the plant DB we have talked about here,
>
> >except for local
> >or specific DB's like the one Miekal originally described. But Georg's
> >note,
> >that
We at PFAF do focus on UK plants. Our coverage of tropical and
southern hemisphere plants is week, so there is ample scope for
those sort of plants.
> That alone is ample reason to create regional DB's: North America,
> Central/South America, Asia, Pacific Rim, UK/ScandinaviaE-W
> Europe/Former USSR. A US/Canada DB would be especially useful.
> Why would PFAF go outof their way to add plant info specific to UC/C;
> might never happen and we need access to a robust centralized DB for
> these areas, not just PC professionals but urban/rural homesteaders
> and homeowners everywhere.
>
> This is a dream project and, in view of the interest expressed so far,
> there's no reason not to get on with it.
>
> >>pc designers might know of different propagation
> >> strategies, uses (designers are aware of uses other people pay no
> >> attention
> >> to, e.g. fire-retardancy . . .
> >
> >raises an excellent point. A few of these uses show up as search fields in
> >PFAF (biomass, insectary, etc.) but permies, being oriented so strongly
> >toward function and relationship rather than size, color, or other physical
> >quality, do make observations that horticulturists or botanists don't. The
> >question for me then is whether it's worth constructing a new DB based on
> >that, or just to add those qualities into an existing DB. It seems simpler,
> >perhaps, to organize these qualities as prose, as observations specific to
> >each plant, rather than adding dozens more fields to a DB, or we risk
> >having
> >vast numbers of blank fields for each species.
The thing to do here is have separate tables for plant uses
in the PFAF DB we have one main table for information common to all
plants, Latin Name, Common Name, Habitat, Geographical Range,
then there are separate tables for the edible uses, medicinal uses,
other
uses. Such a table will have multiple records for each plant
something like:
The problem with writing things as prose is that they are difficult to
search on. Ideally you want separate fields for terms to search on
and prose, which make things easier to read. This does cause problems
with data entry, to ensure that both sorts of info match. A lot of fun
can be had automatically generating textural entries.