krancmm said:So my question: is ATP to be based on a botantical system or "a much better system" or a combination dependent on the passions growers have for specific genera?
I've been spending a lot of time this week thinking about that, and as you know, we are going to be making fundamental changes to the architecture of the database to (hopefully) resolve once and for all this matter by giving us a flexible data format that will work with all cases.
krancmm said:who is this database's users: the general gardening public, botanists and plant pedants (geeks like me) or everyone? The architecture depends on that answer IMHO.
Well, I would think the answer is "all of the above".
There are pedantic sites out there but they are lacking in features and interactivity (itis, theplantlist, etc).
There are general gardening sites out there but they are often not "data driven" enough to be useful. It's hard to dig through articles and tutorials looking for specific information. Most gardeners out there desire to lookup information about specific plants and they want to see pictures, read notes and learn key data points about those plants.
Botanists? Well, they have their sources. I don't know what we can offer them, really. Growing conditions and reports by users are useful to them, I suppose.
databases by committee usually result in some odd looking entries as the designer tries to satisfy everyone...been there. Mabe Dave is way better at this than I was.
This is the challenge of our database and it's something I've been considering for over a decade. The various kinds of plants have very different requirements in their data storage. I am very thankful to have a group of people interested in all those varieties of plants, and they have helped form our database.
Roses have multiple cultivar names.
Orchids have grex names.
Other plants have strange words and abbreviations in their species (I'm looking at you, Sempervivum).
I was talking to Trish about this the other night and I told her that I think that all plant databases in existence are lousy, but hopefully ours is the least lousy, mostly because we have spent so much time and thought into making it work across the board for all the various odd-ball plant cases. The "parent plant" feature with the custom architecture on a plant kind by kind basis is huge for us.
But to make decisions that affect the entire database is treacherous business because of all these differences.
Part of me has wondered if we should loosen, rather than tighten, the way the data is presented in the database.
The other part thinks I should expand out even further what we are already doing and tighten it down even further.
You suggested some time ago adding the source of each latin name and that suggestion got me thinking about re-doing how latin names (and other names) are added and shown in the database, but I'm getting a little ahead of myself and the current topic.
