User:Khorn (WMF)/Plantdata.io

Page for coordinating project for Vienna Hackathon 2017.

Main Idea
This project would allow people with any amount of gardening experience, to find plants that would happily grow in whatever space they have available for growing. The user would place a small sensor package in their available growing space, and let it collect environmental data for at least a day. After that time, the user would take the sensor, plug it into their computer, and then application would use the collected data to find a selection of plants (ideally using Wikidata) that would happily grow where the sensor was placed.

Determine what data we are likely to be able to collect with the sensor package
We will not be building these at the hackathon. However, we need an idea of the inputs that will be going into the initial queries.

Initial inputs:
 * Temperature ranges (though this is not as simple as it may seem)
 * This could be in the form of seed germination temperature, or low/high tolerance.
 * USDA zones (which we are generally familiar with) deal with severity of winters more than other factors, but this is also essentially temperature data that we could use. However, we would prefer to not make geographical blanket assumptions, because microclimates / urban heat islands / any other anomalies exist everywhere. Also, we want this to be useful without re-doing anything if the ice caps melt and everything gets wild. Plants will still like what they like, so let's base the system on that.
 * Sunlight requirements.
 * For food plants, this is frequently expressed in hours of direct sunlight. From there, it gets annoying in that requirements tend to be expressed qualitatively, as in "full/part sun", "full/part shade", "afternoon sun" or some such. We may have to put numbers around these common pieces of data.
 * Humidity
 * Soil humidity:
 * Watering requirements
 * Drainage requirements
 * Air humidity
 * pH
 * Soil type:
 * sandy, clay, whatever?
 * Maybe have a few types in a dropdown, and present a few things that will just work there, and everything else with the required amendments.

Determine what horticultural data currently exists within Wikidata
Can you look up plant items by environmental attributes, currently?

...probably not.

Wikidata query: Instance of any subclass of plant with taxon rank species.

At the first day of the hackathon, there are apparently 104 results that are filled out enough to make this initial cut.

None of the items returned appear to contain environmental data, growth habits, or anything else we need.

However, it will give us a list of plant species that have related unicode characters.

Are there additional data sources that we cold pull in to make this happen, with the idea that maybe wikidata would contain this data in the future and simplify the queries? Obviously we would have to double-check that all the data is licensed properly.

Make some basic decisions about the structure of the project
What framework do we want to use?

Database schema.

Coooooode.
Wikidata SPARQL query Scratchpad for plant data.