OPENKEY PROJECT: NOVEMBER 14, 2002 NOTES

Meeting time: 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Place: Manning Hall 214

 

Members present: Jane Greenberg, Sarah Reuning, Alan Weakley, Steve Sieberling, Evelyn Daniel

 

OpenKey Issues:

 

1. OpenKey Database: Jane updated the group on Sunny Liu's interview. Sunny has taken Database I and II, and web databases, and, although she has not implemented a web interface for a database, the group decided that Jane should offer her a position for next semester working on the OpenKey database.

 

Action Items:

·Offer job to Sunny-Jane

·Find someone on the SILS faculty who can advise the database team-Jane

 

System definition discussion: Sarah shared the database attack plan and database system definition, which is step one of the attack plan.  The team approved the database plan and edited the wording of the definition.

 

Action Items:

·Type up corrections to system definition, add date stamp and version number, and distribute to team-Sarah

·If Sunny accepts the job, give her copies of attack plan and system definition-Sarah

 

 

2. Character definitions: Steve informed that over half of the character definitions are complete. They will be finished by the end of November. At that time, the scientific terms can be linked to more common words. The team decided that a group of people will come up with the common terms, which should only take a few hours. Peter and Carol Ann would be good additions to this group. The team also decided to ask Priscilla (teacher from McDougal Middle School) to do this with some of her students. If Priscilla is not available perhaps Erin Lundsford (the student Peter hired to help Steve) could do it. The team decided to invite Erin to the next OpenKey meeting. The team questioned how thorough the assigning of common terms needs to be and what sources should be consulted.  The team determine that a procedure for determining common terms for plant characteristics needs to be written. The team determined that the week of Dec. 16 would be a good time to have the meeting to create common descriptive terms.

 

Action Items:

·Ask Priscilla if she and a few students are interested in helping write the list of common descriptive terms-Evelyn

·Choose a date during the week of Dec. 16 to have group meeting to determine common terms-Sarah and Jane

·Invite Erin Lundsford to next OpenKey meeting-Sarah

·Write procedure for creating list of common terms for plant characteristic-Steve and Alan

 

 

 

3. Conceptual table: The team fixed a deadline for completing table. The table will be finished by the end of November at the same time that the characters are finished.  The team did not fix a deadline for assigning characters to each of the 44 trees.  Erin Lundsford was mentioned as someone who could help with this process.

 

4. Virtual meeting update: UIUC agrees with the UNC approach to terminology, though UIUC has not thought through the terminology that they will need to describe grasses.  UIUC feels that modifying terms, such as finely or lightly, are ok to include in plant characters.  The UNC team decided to stick with the decision not to use modifying terms. UIUC is coming up with the color set that will be used as part of the plant identification key.

 

Action Items:

·Find out where UIUC is with their part of the grant-Jane (will do this F2F with Bryan at ASIST conference next week.)

 

 

5. Other issues that came up during the meeting: The team decided that field pictures must be taken soon, while there are still leaves on the trees. There may be some slides in the Botany library that can be used.

 

Steve shared the following online polyclave plant identification keys with  the team:

         

http://www.library.utoronto.ca/polyclave/

 

          The use of a grid for sizing was good at this site, but the site itself was clumsy and there were no pictures of plants in the search results. The team did like the fact that the site showed the user the input choices that the user had made to find the result. This site used the "PollyClave" software package to run its polyclave key.  The team did not like this package, especially the icon of the parrot on its back.

 

http://mgd.nacse.org/cgi-bin/hyperSQL_gateway?/hyperSQL/lichenland/hsql/nu3col.soph.hsql

 

          The team liked the "other lichen that you will see with this lichen" feature.

 

http://www.colby.edu/info.tech/BI211/PlantFamilyID.html

 

          The team did not like the fact that if the user picked one false plant character, then no results were returned. The team decided to look into fuzzy matching for the Openkey database.

 

          The team liked having all of the characters states for a given plant shown with the search results for that plant.

 

http://ces.asu.edu/bdi/navikey/sm_common/commonkey.htm

 

          The team like the fact that after the first plant character was chosen, all irrelevant or false characters were automatically eliminated.  This was apparently accomplished using a Java applet.

 

http://plantnet.rbgsyd.gov.au/PlantNet/cycad/ident.html

 

          The last site was not discussed, but was sent with the other site's URLs to the team via email after the meeting.

 

The team considered the possibility of linking to other online polyclave plant identification keys from the OpenKey site.

 

Action Items:

·Determine what field images are needed for OpenKey and which images already exist in the botany library-Steve and Alan

·How is the rest of the scanning coming along?-Peter