[Terrapreta] Charcoal Specs: important new proposition

[Kevin Chisholm]

Dear Christelle

A major benefit to your proposed data base system could be that it 
contributes to standardization of a Test Protocol. Many people in many 
places are conducting many tests with different purposes and under 
different conditions.

Consider any specific test... probably if the circumstances, conditions 
and results were reported and discussed in detail, the report could be 
perhaps 5 to 20+ pages long.  It might be difficult to capture all the 
subtleties of each test in a data base.

The Data Base could be set up in a way that would be helpful to 
Experimenters in setting up their experiments.. "This is the data the 
Data Base needs, so I will set up my experiment to be sure I capture 
that data." Additionally, I would guess that many of us on the TP List 
might not be familiar with Experimental Design and Statistical 
Interpertation of Data. You might include URL's for good sites for these 
topics.

Your proposed DB could thus be very beneficial to indirectly upgrading 
"Biochar Science."

Best wishes,

Kevin

ch braun wrote:
> 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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