OrchidWiz Being Retired

[Ray]

I received an email from Alex and Marianna:

"We want to thank you for a wonderful 17 years. It has been a great journey and we have enjoyed sharing our passion for orchids with you. Though not an easy decision, we have decided to close OrchidWiz on December 31, 2022."

I responded the I understood the desire to retire, and hoped they were magnanimous enough to share it with the AOS.

 

[tomkalina]

Sorry to see them go. OrchidWiz was a useful resource back when I was still judging.

 

[Ozpaph]

now what????

 

[MorandiWine]

Wiz is such a great resource and such much easier to navigate than Orchid Pro. I sure hope that the AOS tries to figure out a way to make OP better. Its nice, dont get me wrong, but interfacing is not its strongpoint.

 

[tomp]

Owiz is such a fine resource, I am already feeling my future pain.

 

[mormodes]

Orchid Roots and Blue Nanta

Orchids: OrchidRoots

Plants: Bluenanta

Registration or an account might be needed to activate some features on the webpages. Free. No spam. Just like here. Photos crowdsourced, just like IOSPE and OrchidWiz. Corrections to misidentifiactions can be made, either by email or the Facebook 'OrchidRoots support' group.

Of the 2 I really only use orchidroots.com and the OrchidRoots facebook page. You can put an icon on your phone for easy access to the webpage. Not laggy.

 

[DrLeslieEe]

This is such sad news! It’s the tool I used most often for research, education and judging. I hope someone will takeover the program? Crowdsource funds to maintain?

 

[Ray]

Funding is one thing. Who’s going to do the work of compiling the data and updating the database?

Seems to me that this would be a good effort for a university.

 

[DrLeslieEe]

Funding is one thing. Who’s going to do the work of compiling the data and updating the database?

Seems to me that this would be a good effort for a university.

Has to be orchid programmers who know the backend of OW.

 

[Ray]

Has to be orchid programmers who know the backend of OW.

Its more than that. I figure the technical end of it is relatively straightforward, but while the parentage information can be obtained from the RHS IOR, the awards data is from multiple sources, globally. Someone has to query those organizations regularly, transcribe the data into the DB. Then there’s the negotiation part of the relationships with the various organizations. It took years before the AOS, for example, would share award descriptions, and to be best of my knowledge, they still don’t share award photos.

To the best of my knowledge, the AOS is the only organization that has a competing product on the market. I would think they’d be wise to take over OW and merge all the data, but money is likely the issue there.

 

[DrLeslieEe]

I am assuming whoever takes over OW will have the protocols, programming codes and relationships with orchid societies to obtain awards.

The AOS program OrchidPro (OP) is still trying to catch up with OW. It doesn’t have the power of analysis and data manipulation of OW. They are trying but there are still a few bugs to fix.

I use both these programs daily and feel that OP is good, but tends to be slow and missing info that OW easily spits out. Would be great if the two can merge but it looks like they speak different languages and therefore a nightmare to fully integrate together. Definitely a tough task for an expert team.