Online Herbs Shopping Project
Herbe – Herb Database Management System
Learning about herb is important for daily medical treatment. People should know how to use herb around them to cure simple diseases in daily life. This reason inspires us to create the herb database application to be used as standard for research and study in the future. We hope that this application will provide knowledge and benefit to every group of people such as instructors, students, doctors, patients, ordinary people, etc. Our work emphasizes on the thorough analysis of the herb database and the mobile application has functions to search enough details for users what are the benefits of that herb, its characteristics, how to use it, therapy, etc. If there is a new herb, we provide a back office website to update and maintain the herb information. Code Shoppy Finally, this project will improve the database perspective of the herb and increase the accessibility of herb data for a better daily health usage.
Herbs are products of nature that comes from plants, animals, and minerals. It can be transformed into medicine or mixed with other ingredients to cure diseases, improve body health, or used in a poisonous way. If people mix herbs of more than two types, it is called medicine. Herbs that came from plants, animals and minerals are called drugs of biological origin. Every part of a plant can be used as the herb; such as leaf, root, flower, fruit, seed, core, etc. This information should be spread to everyone. It provides benefits and advice people on how to use herbs.
Herbs are natural products that were used as a benefit for the treatment of diseases since antiquity. Nowadays, it has been accepted globally that herbs are better than scientific synthetic medicines. There are ten thousand plants that can be used as herbs. Moreover, herbs are used in the manufacturing of foods, beverages, and cosmetics. The only disadvantage of herbs is that users do not have enough information to verify it. It is difficult choosing the proper herbs to use, estimate ratio and volume, know about side effects, and so on. A. Herb Knowledge In Thailand, herb means the natural products from plant, animal, or mineral as the medicine to cure diseases, nourish body, or use in cooking. In general, herb means the medical plant used for curing diseases. Because most of the herbs are plants, this project will focus on plant part of the herb. Plants can be categorized into four main types; herbaceous plants, shrubs, climbers, and trees. Plant consists of five main parts; root, stem, leaf, flower, and fruit [1], [2]. ROOT is divided into two parts. The first part is the taproot system, which consists of Primary Root (taproot) and Secondary Root (a group of lateral roots). Another part is Adventitious Root or the root that is created to do some special duty. The types of adventitious root consist of many types according to its shape and duty [3]. STEM can be categorized into two main types; aerial stems and underground stems. Aerial Stem are stems that we can see above the ground. Underground Stem is the stem that does not rise to the surface [4]. LEAF can be classified into two types; simple leaf and compound leaf. Phyllotaxy is one of the factors that will tell about the arrangement of leaves. Leaf consists of three main parts; stipule, petiole, and leaf blade. Leaf blade consists of seven more details; leaf shape, leaf apex, leaf base, leaf margin, leaf surface, leaf texture, and leaf venation. The shape of leaf blade can be categorized into two types; normal shape and object-liked shape [5], [6]. FLOWER consists of four main parts; sepal, petal, stamen, and pistil. Flower can be categorized in three ways. The first one is about the component of the flower. The second one is about the gender of the flower. The last one is about the amount of flower in one group [7], [8]. FRUIT consists of two main parts; pericarp and seed. Fruit can be categorized in three ways. The first one is about the birth of the fruit from ovary of the flower. The second one is about the fresh inside the fruit [9], [10]. B. Herb DatabaseThere are some examples, which one of them is shown as Fig.1, of herb information from the herb book of Siriraj Hospital [1].
In this section, the HERBE system analysis and design are describe. Herbe is designed using three tiers architecture and the system application is developed into the mobile application as a front-end service and the web application as the back-end service for database management functions. A. System Architecture For the design, there are two parts of platforms; which are android part and website part as shown in Fig.3. The user can be divided into 3 classes: Guest, Member, and Admin. Users will provide searching keyword into their mobile or the website about herbs that they need to know. Both platforms will send the information to interact with our web server that is looked after by admin. The result from the database will be sent back to the user. If the information is new, admin group will update the information in the database. B. Structure Chart The structure chart of Herbe system consists of four main functions: modification, search, comment, and annotation. C. Database 1)Account – The group of account tables focuses on the information and statistic of each account in this system. 2)Herb – The group of herb database tables focuses on the information and statistic of each herb. 3)Part – The group of herb database tables focuses on the detail information of each part (root, stem, leaf, flower, and fruit) of the herb. 4)Usage – The table focuses on the benefits of each herb in the database. 5)Image – The table focuses on the image path of each image about the herb. 6)Annotation – The group of database tables focuses on the annotation record about new herb information. 7)History – The table focuses on the record about each view on each herb data by each user. 8)Record – The group of record tables focuses on the record about the modification that has been made by Admin to each herb data. D. Interface The interface design of Herbe application has two parts: back-end (Website), and front-end (Mobile phone). The first part of this project is in Website, which is the part for administrator to edit information about herb in the database. The examples of website interface are shown in Fig.6. Another part of this project is in Mobile, which is the part for user to find some herb information from the database.
In conclusion, HERBE application is designed and developed based on the thorough analysis of the nature of herb data. HERBE-database consists of more than 50 data tables containing all parts of the herb information. As a results, the evaluation reflects the high score on both the contents and performance of HERBE system. The search engine is designed to support easy usage for any user. Therefore, HERBE is quite a useful application for helping people to gain knowledge about the herb from both Website and Mobile, but it still needs to be improved. In future work, we plan to make the application more stable and improve some function to be more useful.