[Terrapreta] Charcoal Specs: important new proposition

[ch braun]

Hello,

I thought a little bit more about "BiocharDB" and the idea of setting up an
online DB of charcoal experiments.
I read again your different comments, and actually I think it is worth
distinguishing between 2 different issues:

1. Developing a charcoal specification, i.e. a "standard" format for
recording the experiments
2. Developing an online public DB to show these experiments to the world (or
to a restricted specific group of people).

I am now actually pretty afraid that everything fails due to 2. In my
opinion, 1. would be helpful for anybody, because it would allow to define
and store much more easily new experiments, as well as retrieving much more
efficiently results from old trials. So basically I only see benefits for
that. Of course, data still needs to be filled in manually, but that is the
case anyway whatever the format, and so finally there is only the very small
burden of having to learn a "new" format which, I guess, cannot take an
easier and more "user-friendly" aspect than a form to complete.

So my idea now is to provide facilities ( i.e. a small software) which would
allow any user to register easily his experimental data according to the
standard format ON HIS COMPUTER. That would basically consists of fulfilling
a form and having the tool automatically convert the data in XML.
That would remain LOCAL on the computer, NO connection to the web, NO shared
data. Just store your data for yourself more efficiently.

This would be the first step. Once your experiments are stored in a uniform
format, add-on tools could be easily developed to make analysis, statistical
calculations and try to find correlations between the results. YOUR results.
I think that this may reveal some unnoticed relations, even between small
sets of experiments, which justifies the conversion.

So who would be (really) interested by such a tool ?

Again I can for now only see benefits actually, except the need maybe to
"migrate" the data and to learn something new, which as I said can really be
reduced to a minimal overhead. Do you see other problems ? In particular, I
would be very interested to know why people would be reluctant to adopt such
a standard.

Then, a public online DB of experiments such as the one we discussed (see
the draft http://bionecho.org/terrapreta/) would be a complement to this
effort, giving the possibility for motivated users to share their
experimental data in order to build a much larger repository which would
hopefully contribute to the whole research community working on biochar.
But the disclosure of the results would be TOTALLY independent from the
adoption of the standard to register one's data.

Waiting for your comments...

Sincerely yours,
Christelle
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