Create document describing query requirements for db

[christabor]

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

• companion planting
• xericulture
• permaculture

genetics

general

climate change

• what plants are most susceptible to fluctuation changes above x?
• what plants have the broadest zone range?

@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.

[christabor]

From Nicole:

Curious what you think we could do about these strange cases -

1. 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.

2. There are some plants that have multiple colored flowers on the same plant - see Aeschylus hippocastanum.

3. Or the flowers and leaves change over a season - see Hydrangea quercifolia ‘Ruby Slippers’.

4. 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.

[christabor]

This also reminds me of the landscape designer piet oudolf who is known for provocative seasonal landscapes. That kind of planning requires a more comprehensive and dynamic approach to plant data.

[christabor]

I would also call out cultivars designed to display specific types of variegated foliage.

Variegated foliage is known to change if the environment it was originally cultivated or hybridized in deviates enough. I think this is specific to light requirements, as there is a relationship to variegated patterns and light intensity.

Some speckled aucuba I believe will revert to previous non speckled forms if the intensity changes. They tend to be recommended for growth in dappled light, but can also work in direct sunlight.

[christabor]

I should also specify that this speaks only to cloning, e.g. Vegetative propagation, root, rhizome, stolon etc. Seeds will naturally deviate over time so this presents a completely different set of changes that are not addressed here.

[christabor]

Specific to the seasonal planting, there seems to be a few areas that need to be represented:

• bark/stem color change
• foliage color change
• flower color change

We might and also find permutations of {bark, flower, foliage } * {color, shape, pattern } but that might be a bit overkill. I'm not sure.

[christabor]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floral_formula

This is an interesting approach to solving the complexity of just flowers from a botanist perspective. It kind of is a domain specific language of sorts. Just putting it here for reference.

[christabor]

@nicolesimon discuss environmental aspects