Few Words of Introduction
First of all we would like to thank you for your interest of the InterEDEN Plant Database.

EDEN was firstly projected as a single user PC database and implemented with Clipper. Next the Garden Computer Staff made database LAN accessible (LAN operating System was Novell). In 1995 when WWW becomes a new information exchange standard we determined to make world wide access to the database. First edition of InterEDEN (Internet version of EDEN) started in May 1995. While the prototype was a fully implemented transactional database the Internet version was rewritten as a read-only database. Current edition is strongly improved and makes possible simple and structured queries.

We also decided to enrich database content with the plant pictures. For the moment there are photographs only of some of protected species. We will systematically add new pictures. Although some pictures were made outside of the Warsaw Botanical Garden, presented plants looks exactly like the Garden ones.

The biggest fault of the database is lack of standard language version. While plant names are in Latin and Polish, family names are only in Latin and natural localizations are discribed only in Polish. Our team was not able to remove this impediment, we would like to correct the fault in the next version.

We decided to publish Polish names without Polish characters. There are several standards for coding Polish characters (like ISO 8859-2, Win1250) so it could cause many problems with putting synonymous questions to the database (until we implement Polish Font Server TM converting various standards on-demand). The next edition will be deprived of this inconvenient.

OK, it is good time to start exploration InterEDEN now. Attached help windows allows to solve any problem concerning query construction. Feel free to ask the team of anything. Proper e-mail and snail-mail contacts are given in the last program section. Good luck!

InterEDEN Team

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