ghini

a web based interface to botanical garden databases

rationale

ghini, the name is inspired to Luca Ghini, has the aim to offer a web-based interface to a database complying to the ITF2 reccomendations.

the idea is born in august 2012, after Mario Frasca (mathematician) and Saskia Bantjes (agronomist, environmentalist) get in contact with the cuchubo garden in Mompox. the wish to describe it, the thankful words by the president of the foundation named after the cuchubo garden, pushes the two to seek formal help at the botanical garden of the utrecht university, where they get support by the conservator Eric Gouda.

current plan

this program presents botanical collections in geographic context. the collection is managed with an independent program and we advocate usage of line 1.0 of ghini.desktop.

the user exports the complete plants collection in json format and we import it into ghini.web.

you need a script to import your data from the json export to the ghini.web database.

ghini.web is the code running at the site http://gardens.ghini.me

Setting Up

Simply put: download the code, and install the dependencies.

First of all, you need a recent version of nodejs. The one bundled with Debian8, and possibly with anything based on Debian, is v0.10.29, and that's far too old. Follow the instructions on nodejs.org, or trust me and do the following:

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_6.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

ghini.web is a npm-based program. To get all further dependencies: npm install. To start the server: nodejs web.js.

If npm gets confused, rm -fr ./node_modules/ and try again.

Database Connection

ghini.web keeps its data in a mongodb database. You can set up a sample database by running the some_trees.json script, or you can initialize it by running the import tool, feeding it the ghini.desktop 'export to ghini.web'.

using it

• use ghini.desktop to export your database in json format,

• not yet decided how to do this, but you need define the coordinates of the plants,

  • keep coordinates in a text note, with category coords, value decimal degrees separated with a semicolon, first the latitude.

• start nodejs web.js,

• look at your data on http://localhost:5000/,

• open issues to suggest how to change ghini.web.