icon for plants in map, depending on which factors

[mfrasca]

my user has a requirement and I am afraid I need to put some extra information in the database, or I need recognize some already existing category than I can use.

the fact is, she wants that plants are represented differently on the map depending on several factors. by "represented differently", I mean with a different icon.

In her experience a tree should be shown differently than a palm or a shrub, and I might consider this easily solved associating the icon representing the plant to the species (the path for deciding the icon would be like: plant ->accession ->species ->icon).

When she said that some plants, within one and the same species, can be bigger or smaller, I suggested we would give plants a "zoom" property, signifying the minimal zoom at which the plant should be shown on the map. and this does help keeping the map less crowded. Clustering the markers would also work, but then at very low zoom levels I would get hundreds of markers clustered together.

but now she's putting in the database plants that the owner of the garden keeps in pots. and she wants again a different icon.

not wanting to change the structure of the database for each minimal intervention, I first look for the possibilities already there, and I do not see any. the only option I see as viable is using the property 'location', creating a "roaming pots" location. I am not particularly satisfied with this idea, as it feels as high-jacking the 'location' for a different purpose.

I open this issue here to gather opinions and ideas about the problem.