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Re: [ontolog-forum] Ontologist Aptitude Test?

To: "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Joel Bender <jjb5@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 17:22:52 -0500
Message-id: <64A155A4-A914-4178-BA1C-8880A74C0FFF@xxxxxxxxxxx>
David,    (01)


> For this (mythical?) ontology beast:
> - it exists in some form so accessible/useful that people who know  (and 
>probably care) nothing about ontologies will find it & use it with minimal 
>training... some motivated users going so far as to helping to correct & 
>extend it
> - the ontology(s) become self sustaining    (02)

A laudable goal for an open ontology repository.  Drawing on an analogy with 
Wikipedia, what questions would you ask someone who wants the authority to edit 
a page?  What slices of the OBoK would you expect editors/moderators to have?    (03)

> Also... we've been doing software (creating 1,000s of languages in the 
>process) for about 50 years & still have no widely accepted means of measuring 
>it.    (04)

Which reminds me of "lies, damn lies, statistics, and benchmarks".  Yet every 
one of the ways of measuring software performance has been successful in its 
own right for building a foundation of something to improve.  If you want to 
measure performance as it relates to system resources, response time, 
reliability (susceptibility to fail under some circumstances) there are tests 
for that.    (05)

> Few alleged software "engineers" have heard of, much less use, Function 
>Points.    (06)

These are supposed to be used to measure "complexity", correct?  I agree that 
that particular unit of measure has failed in general, but has been used 
successfully like other coding guidelines.  Reducing the number of function 
points reduces the number of interfaces that need to be supported, which may be 
something that is important to the way your software is bundled and 
distributed.  Then again, the opposite may be true, the more functions that are 
available may reduce the number and the complexity of parameters.    (07)

> The "accepted standard" of lines-of-code is accepted without blushing...    (08)

I don't think it is accepted anymore.  Any last vestiges should be killed off 
by looking at obfuscation of Perl code, or any of the "code golf" questions 
that appear on various forums [1].    (09)


Joel
[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/code-golf    (010)


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