Families Key Profile Pages
This page last modified on 21 January, 2007
The Profile page is a tool that I've found greatly simplifies and speeds up visually checking whether the Discarded Entities are not relevant (or alternatively whether all Remaining Entities accurately match your plant sample). The "Profile" of an Entity is a short list of all SubFeatures and their States that the key represents are an accurate description of your plant. This permits a faster check whether all properties of the Entity found match your plant, since mismatched properties should stand out (more or less) at a glance. For an example (from the Asteraceae key) click here to pop up a separate window containing the Profile page for Hazardia squarrosa var. squarrosa which is linked from the Entity list icon in the key.
In preparation of the Asteraceae key, in order to avoid representing as distinct States several different descriptive terms which all have very similar meaning, I had to interpret many of the terms used in the Jepson Manual. Undoubtedly, I got some of the interpretations wrong. For this Families key, the number of distinct States needed for unique identifications has been much larger - and the number of nearly duplicated terms correspondingly smaller. One consequence of this larger number of distinct States is that the percentage of all Entities showing presence of any particular State is usually small. This implies that the search strategy one should use will differ from the strategy I've recommended using the Asteraceae key - a point that will be expanded in separate notes. In particular, I've found it helpful to make extensive use of the Lucid Player's Calculate Differences operation, and the resulting pop-up Differences lists.
Another consequence has been a need to make much broader use of Lucid's "Rarely Present" code to imply several distinct meanings. All of these imply somewhat reduced certainty, or a somewhat less noticed condition (e.g. hairy-ness), but not to the extent indicated by the Lucid "Uncertain" code. So appearance of the the notation "Occurs Rarely" (the term you'll find in the Lucid Help files) in the Families key Profile pages is meant to imply this broader range of somehat reduced certainty.
User Feedback Needed to Help Improve Accuracy of the Key
In a separate note, I'll discuss the use of these Profile lists in connection with continued consideration (maintenance including error correction, addition of States and/or SubFeatures based on common knowledge not yet presented in the current edition of the Jepson Manual, etc...) by a group of users seriously interested in use of the key. To contribute to progressive improvements in the key, these users will need a convenient way to record and communicate the changes they suggest to the principal maintainer responsible for the key. Right now, the Profile pages appear to provide the best medium on which users can write the changes they propose as marginal notes. Eventually, it would seem desirable to make the presentation of such Profile lists for selected Entities a tool built into the Lucid Player itself.
Near term, I am generating the Profile lists in two formats:
The Profile generator is a small program I've written using the Borland Delphi development system. Each time the key gets modified, the Profile page files for Entities with changed coding of States will have to get re-generated.
-- Ken Bowles