On Dec 27, 8:25*am, 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

Here are a few sites that are dedicated to Cattleya orchids and their
relatives:

a href="http://www.cattleyaorchidsource.com/"Cattleya Orchid Source/
a
a href="http://cattleya.wikidot.com/"Cattleya Source Wiki/a

I commend you on the undertaking. Good luck.

John Denson - a href="http://cattleyasource.blogspot.com/"Cattleyas
and More Blog/a