On 6/4/11 9:41 AM, Tillmann Vogt wrote:
Am 04.06.2011 15:00, schrieb Sebastian Fischer:
I think I have read that article a long time ago. I just looked at it again. Very lengthy but true. In the middle there is a section when ontologies work well and ... it all applies to Hackage.
I'm not so sure of that.
When Does Ontological Classification Work Well?
Domain to be Organized
Small corpus 3k libraries is nothing compared to the whole web (referring to the yahoo example), or every book on earth
Sure, it's small by library standards; but then again, libraries have curators. Libraries don't have to deal with everyone just filling out their own metadata when donating a book to the library. In comparison to others corpora of its kind, Hackage is of middling size and still growing. The relevant corpora here are things like CPAN, CTAN, CRAN and the like; not the whole internet, nor even a university library.
Formal categories already exist, just need some improvement
The categories aren't formal. Formal categorization means things like the names of biological species or the various constructs of abstract algebra, things which have a fixed and definite definition. Even the ontology of biology suffered a major upset over the last two decades as genetic sequencing demonstrated that the previous organization of species was woefully wrong. When is something a 2D graphics library vs a 3D library? What about all the shades in between, all the various options like depth parallax, pseudo-3D, fixed perspective, sprites on 3D backgrounds,... before you enter true 3D rendering? Something like the raster category may be a bit more formal, but even with my feeble knowledge of graphics I know that graphics as a whole is a mish mash of differing things and not a formally specified domain.
Stable entities Haskell is a mathematical language, and if there is one thing that will never change then it is math
Haskell is quite mathematical, but mathematics have shifted and changed dramatically over the years. Math changes all the time. Programming libraries and projects even moreso. Goals and directions change all the time. What began as a project in category A could easily shift to become focused on category B.
Restricted entities access only after personal email
What Clay means here is things like a library that only deals in bound volume books, as opposed to dealing also in other literary media (papyrus, velum,...) or in non-literary media (music, video,...). This does describe Hackage pretty well though. It's only for software, and only for software written in (or for) Haskell. While that's still a very broad domain, at least all the entities in it are of the same kind.
Clear edges ?
Participants Expert catalogers Maybe the best educated programmers in the world
Even if we are the best educated, I doubt there are very many Haskellers with expert-level experience in cataloging. How many of us work as librarians, ontologists, or other professions in charge of organizing and curating data? There are a few, I'm sure. Some work in databases, and some do annotation work (e.g., the NLPers), but the average Haskeller is not an expert cataloger. And I'm sure the experts are too busy to have all of Hackage foisted upon them.
Authoritative source of judgment Maybe
Hackage has no Benevolent Dictator For Life (that I'm aware of). -- Live well, ~wren