[Terrapreta] Charcoal Specification Development

[code suidae]

On 10/2/07, ch braun <brauncch at gmail.com> wrote:
> My main concern is actually about the "Material" part. What are exactly the
> relationships between this class, "Soil" and "Charcoal" ? What should go
> under "Attribute" and "MaterialKind" ? Could you give some examples so that
> it becomes clearer ?

A MaterialKind item describes a general kind of stuff. For example,
Oak, Rice Hull, Charcoal, Compost, Fertilizer, Soil (unamended) and
Soil (amended). A Material is a specific instance of a kind of
material. For example, Oak from Dave's woodlot, Charcoal from Dave's
TLUD stove #3, Loess soil from Dave's garden, or Loess soil from
Dave's cultivation trial #2.

Both Soil and Charcoal are Materials and so have the same attributes
as Material as well as the additional attributes linking them to
CultivationTrial and CharcoalTrial. A CharcoalTrial uses a Material as
a feedstock.

A Material would usually be 'providedBy' the same user running the
trial, but not necessarily. If I wanted to test a PyrolysisMethod with
a known feedstock I might get some rice hull from someone who had
already defined it and done trials with it. Thus I could work with a
know material so that I'd be able to compare my results to others with
fewer unknowns.

A CharcoalTrial produces a Charcoal item, which is a Material.

A CultivationTrial is similar to a CharcoalTrial in that it takes
inputs and produces an outputs. The inputs are all Materials, which
can be just about anything, soil, charcoal, minerals, etc. When
starting a trial you would create new items to describe the initial
soil and all the stuff you plan to put into it (of course you would
preferentially use existing items if they were accurate). At the end
of a trial you have a soil, which is a Material. If you wanted to you
could use this Material as the starting soil for another
CultiviationTrial, with or with out amendments.

Here are some questions I have.

CharcoalTrial only allows for one kind of feedstock Material right
now, but I imagine someone is going to want to use blended feedstock.
Should we allow multiple feedstock materials?

I'm not sure how closely we should track crop yields from a
CultivationTrial. Is it enough to simply note how much there was, or
should we include provisions for more detailed nutritional and
physical analysis? Is it enough to put this information in the
experiment log where others can find it, or are enough people going to
report enough comparable details that adding fields of them would be
worthwhile?

For simplicity I only linked one Plant to the CultivationTrial. This
does not allow trials where multiple crops grow in the same test plot
(for example, a plot containing the Three Sisters, corn, pole beans
and squash). That could be problematic, but I wanted to see what ya'll
thought. Should I have a Plant entity describing kinds of plants
'Corn', 'Beans', 'Squash' and then a Crop entity that can link to one
or more Plants? Most crops would simply be one Plant and maybe a note
about the variety, but a few could be multi-plant crops.

If you used the soil left at the end of one CultivationTrial as the
input to another, a significant amount of time might elapse between
the two trials. During this time soil characteristics might change.
Currently only one set of analysis data can be associated with a
material and it is assumed to be unchanging over time. Should a
Material have a list of analysis events so that we can note who did
the analysis, when and where?

Dave K
-- 
"Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know." -
M. King Hubbert