Ghini’s goals and highlights

Should you use this software? This question is for you to answer. We trust that if you manage a botanic collection, you will find Ghini overly useful and we hope that this page will convince you about it.

This page shows how Ghini makes software meet the needs of a botanic garden.

If you already know, and all you want is to do something practical, just install the software, then check our user-contributed recipes.

Botanic Garden

According to the Wikipedia, »A botanic(al) garden is a garden dedicated to the collection, cultivation and display of a wide range of plants labelled with their botanical names«, and still according to the Wikipedia, »a garden is a planned space, usually outdoors, set aside for the display, cultivation, and enjoyment of plants and other forms of nature.«

So we have in a botanic garden both the physical space, the garden, as its dynamic, the activities to which the garden is dedicated, activities which makes us call the garden a botanic garden.

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the physical garden

_images/garden_worries_2.png

collection related activities in the garden

Botanic Garden Software

At the other end of our reasoning we have the application program Ghini, and again quoting the Wikipedia, »an application program is a computer program designed to perform a group of coordinated functions, tasks, or activities for the benefit of the user«, or, in short, »designed to help people perform an activity«.

Data and algorithms within Ghini have been designed to represent the physical space and the dynamic of a botanic garden.

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core structure of Ghini’s database

In the above figure, a simplified view on the database, the highlighted blocks are those relative to objects you definitely need insert in the database.

We distinguish three main sections in the database. Start reading the graph from the right hand side, with the relevant Taxonomy information, then step to administering your Collection, and finally consider the physical Garden.

The central element in Ghini’s point of view is the Accession. Following its links to other database objects lets us better understand the structure:

Accession links Planting to Species

An Accession represents the action of receiving this specific plant material in the garden. As such, Accession is an abstract concept, it links physical living Plantings —groups of plants placed each at a Location in the garden— to the corresponding Species. It is not the same as an acquisition from a source, because in a single acquisition you can access material of more than one species. In other words: a single aquisition can embark multiple accessions. An Accession has zero or more Plantings associated to it (0..n), and it is at all times connected to exactly 1 Species. Each Planting belongs to exactly one Accession, each Species may have multiple Accessions relating to it.

An Accession stays in the database even if all of its Plantings have been removed, sold, or have died. Identifying the Species of an Accession consistently connects all its Plantings to the Species.

Accession at the base of the history of your plants

Propagations and Contacts provide plant material for the garden; this information is optional and smaller collectors might prefer to leave this aside. A Propagation trial may be unsuccessful, most of the time it will result in exactly one accession, but it may also produce slightly different taxa, so the database allows for zero or more Accessions per Propagation (0..n). Also a Contact may provide zero or more Accessions (0..n).

Accession and Verification opinions

Specialists may formulate their opinion about the Species to which an Accession belongs, by providing a Verification, signing it, and stating the applicable level of confidence.

Accessing your own Propagations

If an Accession was obtained in the garden nursery from a successful Propagation, the Propagation links the Accession and all of its Plantings to a single parent Planting, the seed or the vegetative parent.

Even after the above explanation, new users generally still ask why they need pass through an Accession screen while all they want is to insert a Plant in the collection, and again: what is this “accession” thing anyway? Most discussions on the net don’t make the concept any clearer. One of our users gave an example which I’m glad to include in Ghini’s documentation.

use case:
  1. At the beginning of 2007 we got five seedlings of Heliconia longa (a plant Species) from our neighbour (the Contact source). Since it was the first acquisition of the year, we named them 2007.0001 (we gave them a single unique Accession code, with quantity 5) and we planted them all together at one Location as a single Planting, also with quantity 5.
  2. At the time of writing, nine years later, Accession 2007.0001 has 6 distinct Plantings, each at a different Locations in our garden, obtained vegetatively (asexually) from the original 5 plants. Our only intervention was splitting, moving, and of course writing this information in the database. Total plant quantity is above 40.
  3. New Plantings obtained by (assisted) sexual Propagation come in our database under different Accession codes, where our garden is the Contact source and where we know which of our Plantings is the seed parent.

the above three cases translate into several short usage stories:

  1. activate the menu Insert → Accession, verify the existence and correctness of the Species Heliconia longa, specify the initial quantity of the Accession; add its Planting at the desired Location.
  2. edit Planting to correct the amount of living plants — repeat this as often as necessary.
  3. edit Planting to split it at separate Locations — this produces a different Planting under the same Accession.
  4. edit Planting to add a (seed) Propagation.
  5. edit Planting to update the status of the Propagation.
  6. activate the menu Insert → Accession to associate an accession to a successful Propagation trial; add the Planting at the desired Location.

In particular the ability to split a Planting at several different Locations and to keep all uniformly associated to one Species, or the possibility to keep information about Plantings that have been removed from the collection, help justify the presence of the Accession abstraction level.

Hypersimplified view

People using Ghini only sporadically may prefer ignoring the database structure and look at it as two nested sequences of objects, each element of the sequence being necessary to add element at the next level.

In order to get down to an Accession, you will need four levels, as in this example:

_images/family-to-accession.png

A quite complete set of Families and Genera are inserted in your database at the moment Ghini initializes it. So all you need is adding Species and Accessions, in this order.

When placing a physical Plant (relative to an Accession) somewhere in the garden, you need to describe this “somewhere” digitally, as a Location in the garden.

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Highlights

not-so-brief list of highlights, meant to whet your appetite.

taxonomic information

When you first start Ghini, and connect to a database, Ghini will initialize the database not only with all tables it needs to run, but it will also populate the taxon tables for ranks family and genus, using the data from the “RBG Kew’s Family and Genera list from Vascular Plant Families and Genera compiled by R. K. Brummitt and published by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in 1992”. In 2015 we have reviewed the data regarding the Orchidaceae, using “Tropicos, botanical information system at the Missouri Botanical Garden - www.tropicos.org” as a source.

importing data

Ghini will let you import any data you put in an intermediate json format. What you import will complete what you already have in the database. If you need help, you can ask some Ghini professional to help you transform your data into Ghini’s intermediate json format.

synonyms

Ghini will allow you define synonyms for species, genera, families. Also this information can be represented in its intermediate json format and be imported in an existing Ghini database.

scientific responsible

Ghini implements the concept of ‘accession’, intermediate between physical plant (or a group thereof) and abstract taxon. Each accession can associate the same plants to different taxa, if two taxonomists do not agree on the identification: each taxonomist can have their say and do not need overwrite each other’s work. All verifications can be found back in the database, with timestamp and signature.

helps off-line identification

Ghini allows you associate pictures to physical plants, this can help recognize the plant in case a sticker is lost, or help taxonomic identification if a taxonomist is not available at all times.

exports and reports

Ghini will let you export a report in whatever textual format you need. It uses a powerful templating engine named ‘mako’, which will allow you export the data in a selection to whatever format you need. Once installed, a couple of examples are available in the mako subdirectory.

annotate your info

You can associate notes to plants, accessions, species, …. Notes can be categorized and used in searches or reports.

garden or herbarium

Management of plant locations.

database history

All changes in the database is stored in the database, as history log. All changes are ‘signed’ and time-stamped. Ghini makes it easy to retrieve the list of all changes in the last working day or week, or in any specific period in the past.

database agnostic

Ghini is not a database management system, so it does not reinvent the wheel. It works storing its data in a SQL database, and it will connect to any database management system which accepts a SQLAlchemy connector. This means any reasonably modern database system and includes MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle. It can also work with sqlite, which, for single user purposes is quite sufficient and efficient. If you connect Ghini to a real database system, you can consider making the database part of a LAMP system (Linux-Apache-MySQL-Php) and include your live data on your institution web site.

language agnostic

The program was born in English and all its technical and user documentation is first written in that language. Both technical and user documentation use gettext, an advanced tool for semi-automatic translation.

The program has been translated and can be used in various other languages, including Spanish (97%), French (82%), Portuguese (71%), to name some Southern American languages, as well as Ukrainian (100%) and Czech (71%).

Translation of documentation goes a bit slower, with only Ukrainian, Spanish and Italian at more than 50%.

platform agnostic

Installing Ghini on Windows is an easy and linear process, it will not take longer than 10 minutes. Ghini was born on Linux and installing it on ubuntu, fedora or debian is consequently even easier. MacOSX being based on unix, it is possible to successfully run the Linux installation procedure on any recent Apple computer, after a few preparation steps.

easily updated

The installation process will produce an updatable installation, where updating it will take less than one minute. Depending on the amount of feedback we receive, we will produce updates every few days or once in a while.

unit tested

Ghini is continuously and extensively unit tested, something that makes regression of functionality close to impossible. Every update is automatically quality checked, on the Travis Continuous Integration service. Integration of TravisCI with the github platform will make it difficult for us to release anything which has a single failing unit test.

Most changes and additions we make, come with some extra unit test, which defines the behaviour and will make any undesired change easily visible.

customizable/extensible

Ghini is extensible through plugins and can be customized to suit the needs of the institution.