christabor
commented
6 years ago From Nicole:
Curious what you think we could do about these strange cases -
There are sometimes different plants that have the same common name but different scientific names. Most plants have one scientific name (though sometimes they change and the literature doesn’t keep up for a while so it appears like they have two or three scientific names) and many common names.
There are some plants that have multiple colored flowers on the same plant - see Aeschylus hippocastanum.
Or the flowers and leaves change over a season - see Hydrangea quercifolia ‘Ruby Slippers’.
Or the color can be an indicator of existing soil conditions, or controlled to achieve a desired effect. For instance, with Hydrangea macrophylla, you can change the color of the blooms between blue, purple, and pink depending on the acidity of the soil.
Or new growth appears differently than old growth. Or the amount of light and moisture changes the appearance significantly. Or there are some plants that can be sheared into exotic shapes and others are super sensitive and will just die if you look at them wrong....
These are a few weird cases I can think of off the top of my head for fairly common plants. How would we organize those? Seems we would need to include time course data somehow.
The above concerns raise an interesting point - there needs to be a way to formalize a "relationship" between a plant characteristic and a specific environmental constraint.
It needs to be abstract enough to handle the above questions, and more.
Also, the terms "constraint" and "relationship" are overloaded in sql jargon, and this is NOT a advocating for the specific use of those. They may or may not be deemed appropriate at a later time.
I'm currently working on a plant database and one of the important factors in getting the SCHEMA right is making sure it can accommodate various types of questions.
There are two pieces of criteria I would use to judge "correctness":
does it answer the question fully, assuming the data is present? obviously if the data is not available, no schema would work, so I would ignore that as a degenerate case.
assuming the previous, does it do so in a reasonable timeframe? If the query is too slow it's not useful
is it organized in such a way that it doesn't require complex querying? E.g. If sql, is it not so normalized that common query scenarios require a complex jumble of joins?
With that criteria in mind, it is important to enumerate all the likely scenarios. Many of them would be categorical. The few categories I have so far are below. Note that these should eventually be made into questions.
horticulture
landscape design
genetics
general
climate change
@nicolesimon After some discussion, I think we'll move forward with a graph model database, at least in terms of initial exploration. We can leverage document or relational databases if we feel it's inappropriate, but it seems highly advantageous for the complex relationships and idiosyncracies we have to support.
We will need to solve #6, #7, #8 #4 as well, and possibly look at #5 to achieve this prototype.