Construction of Information Retrieval System of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) Plants Seeds

An effective and convenient channel for accessing traditional Chinese medicine seeds knowledge is urgent to be established. After analyzing the different levels of demands from production, education, scientific research fully, related information of TCM plant seeds were comprehensively analyzed and synthesized, a convenient, universal and expansive information retrieval system of TCM plants seeds was built with the Apache HTTP Sever, PHP editing web pages, MySQL database management system. This database is a collection of the 230 kinds of medicinal herbs seeds belong to 86 families, each of the seeds include images, Familia, Genus, Species, name, alias, the original plant morphology, geographical distribution, fruit and seed types, 1000-grain weight, maturity and harvest time, pharmaceutical name, efficacy, seed shape, germination methods, dormancy-breaking methods, dry conditions, conserve and longevity and so on. Retrieval methods of the database is diversity and simple, even users just know one or several pieces of information of one kind of seeds such as name, alias, species or other biological information (fruit and seed shape), they could inquire and get all the information by choosing query terms and query combination The adding and deleting function of the database is very convenient for the administrator to management the background. Image management is independent of the text, this kind of structure is more flexible and could save more resources. Web page of each kind of seeds could exhibit the original plant image and seed images. This system could supply useful information conveniently in a wide range for TCM farm practices, educators, students and other persons.