Would anyone use and contribute to an opensourced "Tortoise table" like database

Mrs.Jennifer

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673
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Norwich CT
Where we are now:
@Tim Carlisle and @turtlesteve have been immensely helpful. @Kapidolo Farms and @Tom have given us advice that we are taking to heart.

I believe we are 90%+ the way to making it public, but even after then we have a lot of "wants" to add.

Right now we have over 353268 unique plant species added, and 11735 that are assumed safe (I need to sync with the actual experts on my assumptions here. You can browse the plants.

What we are missing:
Non plant food sources
Species/group diet recommendations
expanded details on plans
login system is incomplete
search system is incomplete
browsing filter system is incomplete
contribution system is incomplete
missing photos that we can use
missing most common names

This holiday/weekend i plan to:
Finish the search functionality
Finish the login system
Finish browsing filter system
Import 30,000 common names I have collected
Clean up visual aspects
Finish the contribution system
Eat some smoked turtky

What I could really use help on:
Photos, I need photos that either have a license that would allow their use by me, or that you would be willing to give me copyright to or that you will license to me for no cost.

When do we go public:
I hope to go public by the end of the year

Costs:
Current costs are $350 a year, unless costs dramatically increase, I can handle this myself.. At this time I do not plan to add any advertising outside of linking to retailers whom I trust that sell the food item you are viewing.
So once you go public we should see which photos you need and contribute them?
 

Maro2Bear

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So, back into the data fields & entries & overall concept.

I understand that you all are skimming data on these thousands of plants, but do you also plan on having a “Feed Liberally” “Feed Occasionally” & “Never Feed” section on each & every one of these data entries?

I know that there is an abundance of resources available for plant identification purposes, but the “feed don’t feed” info is much harder to nail down.

 

jcase

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Messages
402
Location (City and/or State)
Pittsboro, NC
So, back into the data fields & entries & overall concept.

I understand that you all are skimming data on these thousands of plants, but do you also plan on having a “Feed Liberally” “Feed Occasionally” & “Never Feed” section on each & every one of these data entries?

I know that there is an abundance of resources available for plant identification purposes, but the “feed don’t feed” info is much harder to nail down.


I've listened to and taken a lot of input from a variety of people I trust, and this is where I am currently sitting:

“Feed Liberally” “Feed Occasionally” & “Never Feed” is part of the issue with TTT, it is geared towards Testudos or so it appears. Their database is with one set of tortoises in mind. With all tortoise (and turtle) Species you have to go more in depth.

Toxcity will fall in something like this (this isnt final)
0- Unknown
1- Safe
2- Safe in Moderation
3- Possibly Toxic
4- Toxic
5- Very Toxic

Toxicity is an assumption on our part for a lot of species, and is geared more towards those that are going to experiment and what not. To push them away from what may be toxic. I'm working on a system with TurtleSteve today to programatically rank species. It wont be perfect, so there will be a warnign displayed.

Now "Diet cagetory" is where the "money" is at, this is the better solution, and I had several peopel suggest something like this to me. I'm going to have to lean on others for this, since my experience is with a small subset of asian species (and radiata). People like Will, Tom and others (i somehow forgot to ping @Markw84 regarding all this)

Diet category would allow you to see what Diet groupings a plant fits into, or view a listing of what is in that category, or search the category.

I envision something like:
Grassland
Forrest Dweller
Broadleaf eater
Omnivore

ETC, I'm certainly not the one that should define the categories.

I can get all the basics up and infrastructure built, but I'll need to lean on community members to help define what we need to have, and then once it is up, help categorize everything. Community participation is also something missing from TTT.

I hope this answers your questions.
 

AmandaF

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Joined
Jul 22, 2022
Messages
161
Location (City and/or State)
Congresbury
Where we are now:
@Tim Carlisle and @turtlesteve have been immensely helpful. @Kapidolo Farms and @Tom have given us advice that we are taking to heart.

I believe we are 90%+ the way to making it public, but even after then we have a lot of "wants" to add.

Right now we have over 353268 unique plant species added, and 11735 that are assumed safe (I need to sync with the actual experts on my assumptions here. You can browse the plants.

What we are missing:
Non plant food sources
Species/group diet recommendations
expanded details on plans
login system is incomplete
search system is incomplete
browsing filter system is incomplete
contribution system is incomplete
missing photos that we can use
missing most common names

This holiday/weekend i plan to:
Finish the search functionality
Finish the login system
Finish browsing filter system
Import 30,000 common names I have collected
Clean up visual aspects
Finish the contribution system
Eat some smoked turtky

What I could really use help on:
Photos, I need photos that either have a license that would allow their use by me, or that you would be willing to give me copyright to or that you will license to me for no cost.

When do we go public:
I hope to go public by the end of the year

Costs:
Current costs are $350 a year, unless costs dramatically increase, I can handle this myself.. At this time I do not plan to add any advertising outside of linking to retailers whom I trust that sell the food item you are viewing.
Hi, I am happy to do data entry, if that is helpful.

amanda
 

jcase

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Joined
Jul 27, 2021
Messages
402
Location (City and/or State)
Pittsboro, NC
Hi, I am happy to do data entry, if that is helpful.

amanda
Once it is all up there will be ways for community members to edit, report, or add entries.

I wrote programs to automate all the data entry we have needed so far
 

Cicitina

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Joined
Aug 8, 2020
Messages
266
Location (City and/or State)
Ontario, Canada
The tortoise table site, while great, has been having reliability issues, and well it is just too conservative in some ratings.

If I put some spare server cycles into an open source data base (Where anyone could clone or download the entire database) would anyone else be willing to contribute?
Someone needs to make this an app, with a plant identifier.
There are so many plants growing on my new property that id like to know which are safe and which aren’t. I tried to catalogue as much as I could over the summer and use the tortoise table to figure out which were edible but a lot weren’t even in the database, so I’m at a loss.
 

jcase

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Joined
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Messages
402
Location (City and/or State)
Pittsboro, NC
Someone needs to make this an app, with a plant identifier.
There are so many plants growing on my new property that id like to know which are safe and which aren’t. I tried to catalogue as much as I could over the summer and use the tortoise table to figure out which were edible but a lot weren’t even in the database, so I’m at a loss.
There are many neural network apps for doing this. I actually have made one based on a limited data set for turtle species. The problem is, there is no way I would be able to compete on the plant level for accuracy. Best bet would be able to make an app that can accept shares from already created plant ID apps, which i can do.
 

jcase

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Joined
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Messages
402
Location (City and/or State)
Pittsboro, NC
I'm going to dump status info in this thread to keep me on track

Yesterday was a cluster, found a bug in the database backend. I did end up working around it but either I'll have to dive into their code and fix it or migrate to another database software, as it appears it is a long known and unfixed big. I worked around it by completely rebuilding the database.

I added more common names for us native plants. I added taxa data for plants, to help programmatically help find appropriate food items.

The search function works now.

Fixed the CSS issue making input forms look awful
 

Maro2Bear

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5 Year Member
Joined
May 29, 2014
Messages
14,712
Location (City and/or State)
Glenn Dale, Maryland, USA
I've listened to and taken a lot of input from a variety of people I trust, and this is where I am currently sitting:

“Feed Liberally” “Feed Occasionally” & “Never Feed” is part of the issue with TTT, it is geared towards Testudos or so it appears. Their database is with one set of tortoises in mind. With all tortoise (and turtle) Species you have to go more in depth.

Toxcity will fall in something like this (this isnt final)
0- Unknown
1- Safe
2- Safe in Moderation
3- Possibly Toxic
4- Toxic
5- Very Toxic

Toxicity is an assumption on our part for a lot of species, and is geared more towards those that are going to experiment and what not. To push them away from what may be toxic. I'm working on a system with TurtleSteve today to programatically rank species. It wont be perfect, so there will be a warnign displayed.

Now "Diet cagetory" is where the "money" is at, this is the better solution, and I had several peopel suggest something like this to me. I'm going to have to lean on others for this, since my experience is with a small subset of asian species (and radiata). People like Will, Tom and others (i somehow forgot to ping @Markw84 regarding all this)

Diet category would allow you to see what Diet groupings a plant fits into, or view a listing of what is in that category, or search the category.

I envision something like:
Grassland
Forrest Dweller
Broadleaf eater
Omnivore

ETC, I'm certainly not the one that should define the categories.

I can get all the basics up and infrastructure built, but I'll need to lean on community members to help define what we need to have, and then once it is up, help categorize everything. Community participation is also something missing from TTT.

I hope this answers your questions.


Yes, good answer & thank you. Agree with your last sentence, re: lack of community input to TTT
 

SteveM

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Joined
Oct 29, 2022
Messages
61
Location (City and/or State)
MS
It would be a long wait for good pictures but once spring hits I can send them of maple, japanese maple, oak, crape myrtle, greenbrier, kudzu, a few different grasses, different ivy, pampas grass (I think), honey suckle, spring onions and plenty of other stuff. I do have some things growing around here that I have no idea what they are.
 

jcase

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Joined
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Messages
402
Location (City and/or State)
Pittsboro, NC
It would be a long wait for good pictures but once spring hits I can send them of maple, japanese maple, oak, crape myrtle, greenbrier, kudzu, a few different grasses, different ivy, pampas grass (I think), honey suckle, spring onions and plenty of other stuff. I do have some things growing around here that I have no idea what they are.
Thank you, picture this is a good app for IDing 0pqn5w 8t does have an annoying pop up you must back out kf
 

Maro2Bear

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Joined
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Messages
14,712
Location (City and/or State)
Glenn Dale, Maryland, USA
Interesting & authoritative UK-based plants & more.

 

Tim Carlisle

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You know i have like 15gb of datasets right now on plants with good licenses lol. I just need time to process them, and perhaps write my parsers in something multithreaded ..
Meh. What's a few extra GB's among friends? lol
 

jcase

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Joined
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Messages
402
Location (City and/or State)
Pittsboro, NC
Status:
great overall progress, ran into some speed related issues with the database and realization that I'm going to need much more flexibility. I'm moving everything to amazon AWS, photo storage in bucks, site on a lightsail sever and database on a managed database service. This will improve reliability and speed, it will cost more at first but less in the long run.

We managed to obtain appropriately licensed images for many, possibly most, plant species.

Next couple days will be setup of the site on Amazon AWS, and uploading of photos, wont be much progress on my end otherwise.
 

Maro2Bear

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5 Year Member
Joined
May 29, 2014
Messages
14,712
Location (City and/or State)
Glenn Dale, Maryland, USA
Status:
great overall progress, ran into some speed related issues with the database and realization that I'm going to need much more flexibility. I'm moving everything to amazon AWS, photo storage in bucks, site on a lightsail sever and database on a managed database service. This will improve reliability and speed, it will cost more at first but less in the long run.

We managed to obtain appropriately licensed images for many, possibly most, plant species.

Next couple days will be setup of the site on Amazon AWS, and uploading of photos, wont be much progress on my end otherwise.

Thanks for all of your work & updates.
 

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