Hi,

I've been reading this newsgroup off and on and without a doubt there
are many ways to solve all sorts of problems. In fact, there seems to be
more knowledge in this news group than in any of my local pond stores.
On the other hand, the knowledge in this news group is sometimes
contradictory and sometimes vague; what works in one pond doesn't always
work in another. For example, when people complain about algae one
response is "shade the pond", yet some ponds are in full sun all day and
the water is clear. Or people suggest putting in water hyacinth but the
plants turn yellow, no matter what chemicals are added to the pond. So
there's a lot of knowledge here but it's not complete. I'd like to fill
in some of the gaps and find out what consistently works across a lot of
ponds.

My idea is to have people describe, with a lot of detail, what their
pond is like and what does or doesn't work for them. This would be done
with a survey that asked about pond size, shape, fish and plant load,
filter type, maintenance, and as much as we can think of. This info is
put in a data base. After we have a few hundred ponds described some
form of statistical pattern recognition, or data mining, is applied to
the data to look for some rules of thumb that aren't commonly known. We
could than put the results in a faq.

If this sounds interesting and you'd like to help, let me know. I can
write software to create surveys and data bases, but a few people should
think about the questions. Also, I haven't done much with data mining
and I can figure out enough to get it to work but if you have
experience, let me know.


Thanks,


Matt

btw, remove NOSPAM from the return address to get something that works.