[Terrapreta] Charcoal Specs: important new proposition

[ch braun]

Dear Kevin,

Thank you very much for your answer.
Could you please give me more precisions about the Test Protocols you are
thinking about, and which form this should take concretely ? Would it be
enough to define every such protocol as a subset of mandatory parameters
taken from the charcoal specification, whose value have to be given and/or
measured (while others are optional) ? Is that what you mean ?
So for instance defining a protocol focusing on the influence of the
temperature for which a restricted subset of parameters would have to comply
with some predefined values (feedstock, carbo method...)  while the values
of another specific subset (yield,  chemical composition...)  would have to
be measured by the experimenter for different specific values of the
temperature ?

Concerning the benefits of computer analysis (statistical analysis, data
mining...) performed on such databases, I found an abstract which reflects
quite well what I am thinking about:
" Agriculture is an information-intensive industry from an essential point
of view. Many factors such as soil, fertilizer, temperature, precipitation,
sunray, etc. are all affect harvest, so that information about them is
carefully investigated by expert persons in deciding agricultural
activities. We thus expect to build an intelligent agricultural information
system to assist the experts and to help an improvement on agricultural
technologies [7]. Towards this purpose, we firstly need to provide a system
which can reveal hidden relations among agricultural factors. Although
traditional statistical methods have already applied to this field, we
expect recent data mining technologies to bring still more fruitful results.
In particular, an expert can easily examines IF - THEN style rules extracted
by the typical data mining methods [1,6], he then may give further
investigations around the rules with existing knowledge."
http://www.springerlink.com/content/p10lrdnvck6qfrl8/

And maybe also this one, where they apparently managed to build a model with
which they could deduce the behavior of the yield of a crop as a function of
the physical- chemical soil properties:
http://asae.frymulti.com/abstract.asp?aid=8328&t=2

Doesn't that sound GREAT ??

Sincerely yours,
Christelle


On 9/12/07, Kevin Chisholm <kchisholm at ca.inter.net> wrote:
>
> 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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>
>
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