"what would a design tool for curating meaningful ecological relationships look like?

A decade ago, inspired by this question, I conceived of a web-based application for designing Permaculture guilds.  I solicited a team of developers, secured funding, and began project managing the development of the application, which was dubbed (now embarrassingly) the Permaculture Information Web.  And thus were planted the seeds of awesomeness.  But in time, I meandered off to grad school, funding dried up, and the project has since been cryogenically frozen.  That is, until there’s interest in unfreezing it.

In the interest of a potential resuscitation, here’s the vision.

My intention for the application is to enable gardeners and farmers, rural and urban, to design and grow Permaculture guilds.  The interface of the application would be similar to those of concept-mapping tools, which allow users to explicitly define and interact with relationships between components.  Although it’s not quite a design app, I’m thinking in terms of Thinkmap’s Visual Thesaurus, an online, interactive thesaurus.  When word is entered, say network, it becomes orbited by its synonyms, which are closer or farther away from the original word based on how close or far away they are in meaning.  When one of the synonyms is clicked, it too becomes orbited by its synonyms, and so on, enabling an exploration of language as a complex web of interrelated meanings."