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?