Quercus Program Overview

 

QUERCUS has been conceived as a tool for relevé data edition, storing and manipulation*. It is primarily concerned with phytosociological work, but can be used for other types of species data bases.

Relevé data is primarily formed by a list of taxa. To handle is necessary to use a taxon thesaurus file. This has two main purposes: First, taxon names can be checked to avoid errors in data introduction. Second, taxonomy can map synonym taxon names to their valid counterparts. The above restrictions make necessary to use taxon thesaurus files in Quercus.

All files, both thesaurus files (taxa, syntaxa and bibliography files) and table files (relevé tables and synoptic tables), are managed by a Project Manager, and the options are stored Quercus Project File. This provides a working environment structure in Quercus.

[*Note: Relevé data multivariate analysis can be performed using another VegAna module, called GINKGO].

 

Quercus Edition Modules

Quercus has different editors which handle different data types.

• Primary Table Editor (Alt-F1): <refer>

• Work (or Secondary) Table Editor (Alt-F2): Enables the manipulation of releve table rows and columns. Entries can be joined or filtered. It prepares a releve table to be exported for analysing or publishing it. Synoptic tables are build from this editor.

• Synoptic Table Editor (Alt-F3): A synoptic table is essentially a relevé table where each "relevé" is synthesis for a group of relevés in an original relevé table. Relevé values are constancy values expressed in percentage. The Syntethic Table Editor enables the manipulation of these synoptic tables as one would do with Work Table Editor.

• Taxon Thesaurus Editor (Alt-F4): This editor allows the edition of taxon thesaurus files for its subsequent use as Taxon Thesaurus File in Quercus or other VegAna programs.

• Syntaxon Thesaurus Editor (Alt-F5): This editor allows the edition of syntaxon thesaurus files for its subsequent use as Syntaxon Thesaurus in Quercus.

• Bibliography Thesaurus Editor (Alt-F6): This editor allows the edition of bibliography thesaurus files, so relevé can be specified to come from a given bibliographic work.

 

File Menu in Quercus Editors

All the Quercus editors share some File menu commands, which are listed below:

Command	Menu Item (File Menu)	KeyStroke
Opens a document	Open	Ctrl-O
Creates a new document	New	Ctrl-N
Saves the current document to the current file	Save	Ctrl-S
Saves the current document after showing a dialog	Save As
Closes the current document (warning if not saved)	Close	Ctrl-F4

 

Data types in Quercus

All data in Quercus, as in Ginkgo, is stored in XML format. This enables reading and manipulating data with a simple text editor in an easy way. Files used in Quercus can be of 6 different types:

1. Quercus Project File
2. Releve Table File
3. Taxon Thesaurus File
4. Syntaxon Thesaurus File
5. Map Configuration File
6. Bibliography Thesaurus File

Each of these types has its own XML tag definition. In addition, each data type is edited by a different Quercus module.