ABSTRACT

Ethno botanical research has historically played a vital role in mankinds understanding of the relationship between people and their biological environment. Today, it remains a rapidly growing field of research, gaining professionals, researchers and public interest both within the local and international environments. Researchers have however been very slow to adopt and apply tools of the informatics revolution, and integrate research data collaboratively. Besides, if ethno botany is to continue to be dynamic as a discipline, it is necessary to encourage collaborative ethno botanical research as well bridge the digital gap between researchers and emerging bioinformatics tools through the application of information technologies. This integration would greatly assist in stemming the tide of the unprecedented loss of global bio cultural diversity in the twenty-first century.

This project designed web-based local healing system (ETHNOBIS) containing information on medicinal plants including their scientific names, folk names, plants parts used and diseases treated for traditional medical practitioners and researchers in Ibadan.

A web-driven database system was chosen as the best alternative because of the identified shortcomings of the existing system and its ability to enhance effective information delivery to wider public or scientific audience over a spatial geographical location. The methods used for data collection for the system were observation, interview and review of existing documents on the medicinal plants.

Traditional System Life Cycle (TSLC) was used as the system development methodology. The developed web- application system thrives on java application as client, JDBC-ODBC as MySQL driver and MySQL database as server. The developed database system uses model that is logically centralized but physically distributed approach based on object-oriented database technology.

The study provides a foundation for a locally current dynamic data resource that encourages comparative ethno medicinal research through direct contribution by research community.

The system was properly tested to ensure its operational adequacy and efficacy. The parallel running method is recommended as change over technique from the old system and the methodologies adopted for evaluating the performance of the system were system efficiency and effectiveness.

The study recommended that the system should be upgraded to premium versions of MySQL database server by buying more space to accommodate for the inclusion of digital images, sounds and more data in the database storage space and to make the database server response time faster.