I already have a series of tables defining the world's continents, oceans, nations, states, etc. Actually, it's just two tables. Type defines the kinds of divisions, like this:
TABLE: TYPE (ID) (Type) pla | planet kon | continent oce | ocean nat | nation sta | state pro | province Table famarea lists geographic names, identifying each by ID and type and matching them to their parents... TABLE: FAMAREA (ID) (Name) (Type) (Parent) us-al | Alabama | sta | usa afr | Africa | kon | ear (Earth) alb | Albania | nat | eur arc | Arctic Ocean | oce | oce (Oceania) Now I want to incorporate ecological regions. They include the eight REALMS the world is divided into, fourteen major BIOMES and over 800 ECOLOGICAL REGIONS. I can easily define these three types in my Types table: TABLE: TYPE (ID) (Type) kon | continent rea | realm bio | biome eco | ecoregion But then I quickly get confused because ecological regions don't follow national or even continental borders. Adding a table similar to famarea, simply listing each realm, biome and ecological region and including parents, would probably be too complex. My instinct is to first create three separate tables, listing the realms, biomes and ecoregions, respectively. I could also add parents to the EcoRealms table, since there are only 8 realms, and none have more than two parents: TABLE: ECOREALMS (ID) (Name) (Parent 1) (Parent 2) R-PA | Palearctic | Eurasia | Africa R-NA | Nearctic | North America | (NULL) I think I would then list two KINDS of parents for ecoregions, the biome and realm: TABLE: ECOREGIONS (ID) (Name) (Biome) (Realm) NA010 | Great Plains | B-5 | R-NA NA011 | Tallgrass Prairies | B-5 | R-NA AT023 | Steppe | B-5 | R-PA NA10 | Boreal Forest | B-2 | R-NA For example, the table above identifies the Great Plains, Tallgrass Prairies and Steppe as temperate grasslands (biome B-5). However, it matches the first two with NORTH AMERICAN grasslands, with steppes matched to Eurasian grasslands. If this is OK so far, then I need to figure out what to do with biomes, each of which can have several continents (or realms) as parents. Should I just add extra lines for extra parents, like this?: TABLE: ECOBIOMES (ID) (Name) (Parent) B-5 | Temperate Grasslands | R-NA (North America) B-5 | Temperate Grasslands | R-PA (Eurasia) ...or should I just make a table that simply lists the biomes and ID's, then make a fourth table that matches the biomes to their parents, like this?: B-5 | R-NA (North America) B-5 | R-PA (Eurasia) Thanks. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
