Topic on User talk:Khorn (WMF)/Plantdata.io

Spinster (talkcontribs)

I saw you guys present this at the Wikimedia Hackathon showcase and became very enthusiastic - so enthusiastic even that I have looked up the project afterwards. I hope you'll continue working on this or will try to seed it further.

It piqued my interest specifically because I'm a plant lover (both indoors and outdoors - I have a city balcony full of plants) constantly looking for inspiration, and I've been pretty annoyed (and surprised) by the lack of open/standardized or even comprehensive online databases about plant growing online. So there's definitely potential here! And I think it's a great idea to let Wikidata power this in terms of data.

My first thoughts would be:

  • Please include the use case of indoor / house plants from the beginning
  • Make it worldwide - I'm explicitly saying this because many/most of the books and websites I find, are country-specific and it would be a huge selling point to address this globally
  • Not sure if the 'starting point' should be sensor data. A lot of the user's input can probably be obtained without sensors - hours of sunshine + humidity of soil can be observed/calculated easily, and when a user inputs his/her location, one can probably obtain average climate values via geo coordinates
  • Yeah, the metadata is crucial and at first sight I'm also stumped there. Lots of variables to take into account, and in my limited experience every book and website is slightly different in that area. Copyright is problematic when you want to import entire datasets, but when just referencing those for sourcing specific statements it's OK IMO. It would be fantastic to find plant geeks who are willing to work on this on Wikidata. WikiProject?
FunctionOverForm (talkcontribs)

This is pretty easy, just standardize the sensors, and sensor data is a better choice. basically if you only accept temperature and humidity data from DHT11 sensors (probably the cheapest and easiest), they're available worldwide, less than 5$ each. for water temperature you can use Dbs18b20 sensors, for sunlight you can use a photo cell, again a few dollars. with a chinese arduino board and we can just use a standard sketch, that's relatively modular in nature, possibly a GUI where you check some boxes about which sensors you have, load it up to the arduino and place the sensors in locations, maybe with a quick guide instructing where to place sensors for optimal consistency of the data. I can write/post an arduino sketch that will export the data to a terminal, or a nanpy program that exports it to a text file, and then you can take a plant variety as an input from the user, and if the formatting of the text file is standard, it's very easy to parse. if they're doing all of this from a raspberry pi it's easy enough to set up a cron job with a script to upload a text file once a day to the server, with a hard limit on size (<5kb is good). all of these things are relatively simple to do, it's just a matter of shrinking the whole idea down to a standard shopping list for consistency and keeping costs and low as possible to encourage people to do it. at any rate, I'm down for whatever. check out https://github.com/Funct10n0v3rf0rm/Greenhouse-arduino-pi for some stuff I'm working on, it's a messy work in progress but there's some usable code there, mostly for controlling lights and pumps indoors.

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