Developing and maintaining naming conventions and information relating to our living products are difficult problems for the Ornamental Horticulture industry. Unlike most industries that create products for commerce, our industry has no universal naming convention for their plant products. The result is an incongruous tangle and multiplicity of common and botanical names.
This creates confusion not only for those within the industry but, more importantly, for the consumers of our products.
Providing information in a manner to enable consumers to easily compare and contrast plant traits, characteristics, and uses have been underdeveloped. At the point of sale, the consumer is dependent upon trained horticulturists for product information; a limited and diminishing resource.
The Corymb Group, LLC of Batavia, IL has solved this dilemma through its product, the Cultivar Library of Ornamentals (CLO). This online resource contains over 40,000 commercially available Cultivars in North America including annuals, perennials, herbs, grasses, garden vegetables, and woody ornamentals.
The CLO starts with providing a highly structured naming convention that provides continuity, enforces integrity and organization, and facilitates accurate context-based search. The CLO doesn't rely upon a single naming convention. It supports botanical names, the name of commercial prevalence, as well as common names used throughout North America. To provide flexibility, we maintain alternative botanical and common names.
Each entry contains extensive descriptive information, searchable physical attributes, origination, patents, and marketing relationships.
The engine that drives the CLO is the highly structured naming convention that:
- provides continuity in cultivar naming
- enforces data integrity and organization
- enables extremely effective analytics
- facilitates accurate context- based searches
The Corymb Group creates applications that provide access to this repository. Central to the application is the Cultivar Search Engine, which provides the first truly intuitive interface designed to select, group by and sort on specific user defined Cultivar or Genera attributes. By simply selecting the attributes on which to search then selecting the criterion, the engine enables the user to succinctly retrieve desired information with pinpoint accuracy.
Sample Cultivar and Genera Information Sheets