Construction of retrieval database system for ornamental plants in Tibet, southwestern China.

The unique geographical location and ecological conditions in Tibet provide a superior variation of environment for the wild ornamental plants to nurture a large number of endemic species, which are germplasm resources to breed new varieties of ornamental plants. For the orderly conservation, development and management of wild ornamental plants in Tibet, “Tibetan ornamental plant retrieval database system” has been established by using Visual Basic, MS Access, MS Excel and other software, and its installation program can be standalone install in Windows 98 above the operating system through the visual interface, which has been built by the Setup Factory. The core of this database software is to use ADO (ActiveX data objects) and JET (joint engine technology) interface to connect to the database, and through the SQL (structure query language) to retrieve information. The system consists of three firstmodules, such as “user search”, “data management”, and “help”. Ordinary users can use the “user search” module to quickly find the information of wild ornamental plants in Tibet through three ways of “search by family,” “search by genus” and “fuzzy search”, and the information contains 17 references. “Data management” module is designed for the administrator, which contain add, delete, modify, update, and other secondmodules. You can get password authentication from administrator to enter “data management” module in order to add, delete, modify, update the information of the wild ornamental plants in Tibet, and can batch import information by using MS Excel also. Since 2010, “Tibetan ornamental plant retrieval database system” has contain a total of 208 kinds of wild ornamental plants, belonging to 64 genera and 28 families.