We are living in a land of plenty, used to having access to the world at our doorstep and not giving further thought to it. A basic principle of biological sustainability is the preferred use of local resources. On this site I'll portray plants of the region I live in (i.e. Hagenbach, Germersheim, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, Europe), which can be used as food, medicine or for other purposes.
How was the information processed?
Plants included here are species I observed in the course of a project that started in 2019.. Each observation is documented by an image of the plant and concluded with the determination of the scientific name.
Using the scientific names of these plants, corresponding pages of Plants For A Future (PFAF) were mined for information regarding the qualities edibility, medicinal application and toxicity (or potential hazards), relevant data was extracted and saved to a database. During this step, keywords for attributes of qualities (e.g. edibility: 'raw', 'cooked', etc.) were adopted from PFAF and if required newly created. Text that contained references to the original source describing the corresponding attribute was also saved. Attributes are either assigned to the plant or to a scpecific part of the plant (e.g. leaf, flower, root).
An evaluation was undertaken during translation and the integration of attribute descriptions from Wikipedia. In the group of medicinal attributes a revision took place, during which special terms were either replaced by or merged with a more general one. Requirements for this were:
What information is provided?
Where is the information from?
*Primary source for edible, medicinal and toxic qualities.
*Compilation of scientific plant names.
*Used as source for attribute descriptions.
*Data and information about wild plants and the vegetation of Germany.
What comes next?
In the future I'd like to include additional species observations and to complement the documentation with images of relevant plant parts.
To enrich the information content I want to include species descriptions and determination notes (incl. explicit indicators for similar apecies) as well as habitat details.
I'd like to improve the data extraction process (e.g. recognize additional attributes) as well as the translation and related sentence constructions. Furthermore I'd like to provide an extended search function (e.g. that allows the user to find plants with specific combinations of attributes). By introducing attribute synonyms the information should become more accessible.