packat wrote:
Hello,
I am a computer scientist who has a deep passion for orchids. My
parents grew several orchids where I grew up (Thailand), way back in
the 60's. Our fence at the front part of the property lined with 8-9
feet long poles covered with coconut husk and grew Vanda on them.
They are very common in Thailand. I don't know what species, but the
plants grew as tall as the poles and flowered profusely. The leaves
were thin about 10 cm long with round cross section. We had several
other kinds of orchids too, mostly natives of Thailand.

I now live in Maryland near DC. I have spent fortune over the years
trying to grow several orchids I bought from local nurseries and
internet. But I wasn't successful. They all eventually died. But
even with all these failed attempt, my love for orchids has never
faded. I decided to turn to studying them instead of growing them.
My new goal is to build a web-site that I (or any site visitors) to
search the database that stores taxonomy and various characteristics
of each species. For instance, people could request: "find all
orchids with red lip, yellow petals, 2-3 cm in size,....." etc.
The response would be the list of species that match, or fuzzy match
these characteristics. I hope to also show pictures that I collected
over the years from the internet. Probably those that some of you
took. But I need to work out the intellectual property issue first
before I can do that.

My questions to the community a
1) Would this be useful to you?
2) Is there a website(s) that has comprehensive list of orchid
taxonomy? I have looked at several sites including wikipedia, which
are very useful, but I haven't yet found an authoritative and
comprehensive site.
3) This is a stupid question: I found several differentiations
between sites on the species name: e.g. dayana vs dayanum, coccinea vs
coccineum, aurea vs aureum,... and many more. What is the standard
practice when it comes to choosing which version to use?

Thanks,
pax

The site most of us use now to look up a species is this:
http://www.orchidspecies.com/
Now, if you could do what you say you want to do and make it searchable
by a description, that would be most useful when we have no idea what an
orchid is. With the site above, a person needs to have an educated guess
about what the genus is, in order to find a plant.
I'm not sure that you realize what a massive project this would be. Look
at the size of the orchid species site and you will have a good idea.
As far as your questions about names... the species name needs to match
the gender of the genus name. Sometimes scientists decide to place a
plant in a different genus. If the new genus has a different gender, the
species name needs to change to reflect that.

Steve