This application filters plant photo data from websites like Flickr and Twitter as simply searching for plant photos on websites like Flickr and Twitter results in a lot of images that are not of plants, let alone the plant the user is searching for. Xin was able to filter out the “bad data” with inclusion and exclusion tag lists so that the results are more relevant. I am currently implementing the functionality of Xin’s “Tag your plants” application into the database so that users can add photos from Flickr and Twitter without having to search through large amounts of irrelevant data.While I have developed the SAGE Plant Database for crowd participation, the SAGE Plant Database is not yet ready for deployment for crowdsourcing input. For the initial implementation of this design, the technology steward has depended on a “test” crowd that does not overlap with the potential “homegrown” crowd so that the homegrown crowd does not fatigue during testing. Presently the database is seeded with data for the region that the Manzanita community is located within from four sources: the USDA Plant Database, the Natural Capital Plant Database, a list created by students in a local permaculture class, and data created by three offerings of a UCI undergraduate course about global change, sustainability, and information technology. Data from these resources have been translated into our database to maintain the terminology convention I created. The data is sparse and incomplete, blueberry grow bag containing 35402 data points for 4224 plants, but serves as a starting place.
Tolerance, products, and services are the least provided plant properties. The most concerning issue with this initial population of plant data was that some of the specified uses of plants were dangerously wrong. For example, some participants stated that toxic plants were edible. It is imperative that we update the crowd sourcing methodology to prevent the occurrence of incorrect data that could lead to harmful effects. We must identify which of these data properties requires specialized knowledge and have critical impacts. Consequentially, acquiring accurate tolerance, product, and service data poses one of the most significant challenges of this research. The next chapter reviews each of the challenges and limitations of this research that motivate my anticipated future work for the SAGE Plant Database. Before that, I review of the contributions of the research presented in this dissertation.Reports from the US National Research Council also underscore the importance of creating databases and the other tools within the envisioned SAGE suite for agricultural sustainability. The report titled Toward Sustainable Agriculture in the 21st Century argues that landscape-scale planning tools supported by relevant databases “could contribute to effective targeting of efforts at the farm, community, and watershed levels” . Databases, the report argues, are a part of research platforms that “encourage and support interdisciplinary research beyond traditional biological integration to economics and social sciences” . The report titled Computing Research for Sustainability argues that databases and other “fundamentals of the computer science field … offer unique and important contributions to sustainability” . Specifically, “databases play a crucial role in the understanding of ecosystems” , from storing raw measurements of the environment to providing inputs to and recording outputs of predictive models of ecological functions.
The report further explains that computing methods, such as “queryable structured data,” are essential to coping with vast amounts of unstructured data that is now available within sustainability research . Though this dissertation ends with the initial implementation of the SAGE Plant Database, it primarily demonstrates the stakeholders’ practices, values, and information needs, the database design, and the need for such a system in the presence of other databases. In the next section, I review the distinct contributions of this research to the scientific community and the participating sustainable agriculture communities. Then I summarize the issues encountered in this research and limitations of this work. Finally, I present a roadmap for future work on SAGE.This dissertation set out to understand the information needs and practices of sustainable agriculture communities and sought to demonstrate how to involve sustainable agriculture communities in the development of information technologies for their practice. Through this process I became intimately familiar with the practices of two sustainable agriculture communities. I presented their practices throughout the dissertation, from Prologue to the Comparative Analysis . These observational accounts are themselves a significant contribution to research, as so few formal inquiries into permaculture communities exist . In addition to this inherent contribution, there are six distinct contributions, for both research and grassroots sustainable agriculture more broadly, that I would like to call special attention to: definition of information challenges and community values; the formation of goals, requirements, domain knowledge and design of the SAGE Plant Database; grounded development of a plant ontology for agroecosystems; a comparative analysis of databases used by and designed for the communities; and an implementation of the SAGE Plant Database. The definition of information challenges and community values, and the formation of goals, requirements, and domain knowledge contribute to an understanding of an under-explored set users in the HCI domain. The design and implementation of the database contributes to knowledge about systems, tools, architectures and infrastructure at the intersection of agriculture and HCI domains.
The grounded development of the plant ontology contributes a high-level model to the agriculture domain that can support the education of newcomers to sustainable polyculture design. The comparative analysis contributes to the development and refinement of plant database artifacts and interaction techniques for sustainable polyculture design. This section reviews each of the six contributions in detail.However, sustainability is the overtone of these values, and sustainability is well explored in HCI. In context of DiSalvo, Senger, and Brynjarsdóttir’s axes of differences of S-HCI research, my research considers sustainability as both a research focus – I incorporated the values of sustainability into the information systems – and application area – I supported the work of sustainable agriculturalists. Continuing with their axes, this research situated users as individual activists bound by a community and cause, aimed to solve the users’ problems rather than framing the user as a problem, supported the fundamental change of user lifestyles, and grappled with the inadequacies of technology as a solution to their problems, including the “wasteful rapid obsolescence cycle of IT products.” In context of Knowels’ et al. themes for motivating questions in S-HCI research, my research explored the role of technology in making society sustainable and promoting less destructive and more satisfying patterns of consumption. This value set is an opportunity for reflection and evolution for the participating community with an opportunity to reflect and evolve on. As the communities build tools, incorporate new practices, and forge new collaborations, the value set can be used as an evaluation tool for making decisions and designs. Cultivation and consumption of pomegranate can be dated back to at least 3000 BC. Historically, pomegranate has served as a symbol of fertility and prosperity. In addition, various parts of the pomegranate have been used in traditional medicine for treating a wide variety of illness. Pomegranate fruits have purported use for expelling parasites , seeds and fruit peels for treating diarrhea, flowers for managing diabetes, tree barks and roots for stopping bleeding and healing ulcers, and leaves for controlling inflammation and treating digestive system disorders. Due to its reported benefits to human health, the pomegranate has drawn great interest from the consumers in recent years. Nowadays, the pomegranate is used for functional food ingredients and dietary supplements in various forms, such as fresh fruit and juice, powdered capsules and tablets that contain extracts of different pomegranate tissues, tea brewed from pomegranate leaves, jam, jelly, juice and wine produced from pomegranate fruits, blueberry grow bag size as well as spices prepared from dried seeds. With the advancement of technologies and the expansion of experimental inquiries into the bioactivities of pomegranate phytochemicals, many new discoveries have been made in this ancient fruit within the last decade. To date, over 1500 articles have been published on the subject“pomegranate”, of which 1259 articles were published between 2006 and 2016. Although the pomegranate produces and accumulates a wide variety of phytochemicals with diverse structures in different tissues , investigative efforts thus far have been given mainly to the bioactivities of polyphenols in pomegranate fruits, in particular anthocyanins and hydrolyzable tannins , which are assessed in this review. Specifically, various health-promoting activities of urolithins, a group of phenolic metabolites transformed from ellagic acid by the human gut microbiota, will be reviewed. Development of cutting-edge analytical techniques has enabled the acquisition of large-scale metabolic datasets, which requires careful analysis and interpretation.
To facilitate characterization of metabolite profiling data in pomegranate, we examine the phytochemicals that have been identified in pomegranate, including detailed information on the chemical structures, molecular formulas, molecular weights, analytical methods , and tissues of identification . Knowledge of phytochemicals present in different pomegranate tissues will also help assess the structural determinants of their bioactivities as well as the additive, antagonistic or synergistic interactions of these phytochemicals in complex mixtures.HTs are among the most studied phytochemicals in pomegranate; they can be further grouped into ETs and gallotannins based on the different phenolic acids that are esterified to the core cyclic polyol molecule . Overall, more than 60 HTs have been identified from pomegranate using MS and/or NMR . Pomegranate fruit peel is rich in HTs, particularly ETs. Punicalagin isomers constitute up to 85% of total tannins extracted from pomegranate fruit peel. EA, methylated EA, and their glycosidic derivatives have also been found in fruit peel and other pomegranate tissues . Although punicalagin isomers represent the major ETs in pomegranate roots, they accumulate at much lower levels in roots than fruit peel. Besides fruit peel, pomegranate stem barks are also abundant in HTs and have been used historically in tanneries for making leather. In addition to the HTs identified in fruit peel, stem barks also contain ET C-glycosides, punicacorteins A–D , and punigluconin. The dense inner part of pomegranate tree trunk contains brevifolin carboxylic acid, EA rutinoside, diellagic acid rutinoside, methyl-EA, methyl-EA rutinoside, punicalin, galloylpunicalin, and galloylpunicacortein D. The composition of HTs in pomegranate leaves is largely different from that in fruit peel. In leaves, the major HTs are granatins A and B, whereas punicalagins and punicalins are present at negligible levels. Additional ETs with galloyl and/or hexahydroxydiphenoyl substitutions have also been identified in leaves. Interestingly, derivatives of EA and ETs, including urolithin M-5, brevifolin, and brevifolin carboxylic acid, have been isolated from pomegranate leaves. In pomegranate flowers, EA and two oxidized derivatives of EA, pomegranatate and phyllanthusiin E, were discovered. Punicatannins A and B, two ETs that contain an unusual 3-oxol,3,3a,8b-tetrahydrofuro[3,4-b]benzofuran functional group, together with a structurally relatedcompound isocorilagin, were also found in pomegranate flowers. In addition, brevifolin carboxylic acid, ethylbrevifolin carboxylate, as well as glucose with various galloyl and/or HHDP substitutions, including hippomanin A, gemin D, digalloyl-diHHDP-glucose, trigalloyl glucose, and gallic acid 3-O-β-D–glucopyranoside showed measurable accumulations in pomegranate flowers.Pomegranate fruit peel, aril, and juice are abundant in flavonoids of diverse structures, including the aglycones and glycosides of chalcones, flavanones, flavones, flavonols, ATs, flavan-3-ols, and procyanidins . Two flavones, luteolin and tricetin, were found in a methanolic extract of pomegranate flowers. Structures of two flavanones, punicaflavanol and granatumflavanyl xyloside, were elucidated by NMR, while hovetrichoside C and phlorizin were identified by IR in pomegranate flowers. Similar to other plants, leaves of pomegranate also accumulate high levels of flavone glycosides. Two flavanone diglycosides and one flavonol diglycoside isolated from pomegranate stem barks were shown to be eriodictyol-7-O-α-L-arabinofuranosyl-β-D-glucoside, naringenin-40 methyl ether 7-O-α-L-arabinofuranosyl-β-D-glucoside, and quercetin-3,40 -dimethyl ether 7-O-α-L-arabinofuranosyl-β-D-glucoside, respectively, by NMR analysis. High performance liquid chromatography -DAD studies revealed that two isoflavones, genistein and daidzein, as well as a flavonol quercetin, are present in pomegranate seeds.Plant lignans are a group of phytoestrogens that can be metabolized into mammalian lignans by the gut microbiota. Furofuran-, dibenzylbutane-, and dibenzylbutyrolactone-type lignans have been identified in different pomegranate tissues based on liquid chromatography -MSn studies , while isolariciresinol is the most abundant lignan present in pomegranate fruit peel. In addition to the above-mentioned lignans, pomegralignan, a dihydrobenzofuran-type neolignan glycoside, was discovered in the aril and fruit peel of pomegranate. Another neolignan, punnicatannin C, was isolated from pomegranate flowers and structurally characterized by NMR analysis. Triterpenoids and phytosterols have been found in pomegranate seed, leaf, flower, fruit peel, and bark tissues .