Ed, (01)
I'm moving this thread to Ontolog Forum, since it addresses a broad
issue: How do we recognize legitimate subtopics, avoid endless
fragmentation and duplication of effort, promote interdisciplinary
collaboration, and help search engines find related documents? (02)
NY Times
> The Association for Computing Machinery, a leading professional
> association in computer science, is this week holding its annual
> conference focused on what we're now calling data science - though
> the ACM still clings to the label adopted when the yearly gatherings
> began in 1998, Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. (03)
JFS
> That's the fundamental principle for creating the illusion of progress:
> Change the name of the field every decade. (04)
EJB
> I don't think that is fair. Anyone I know or knew in the field has long
> thought that "data science" is the term for the computer science associated
> with information management. (05)
If everyone knew that, why did they need another name? For that matter,
note that the NYT reporter thought that 'data science' was a new name. (06)
EJB
> Into the early 1980s, the problem was always in getting the 'computer
> science' gang (ACM in particular) to recognize that there was a computer
> science aspect to information management systems (07)
ACM started TODS (Transactions on Data Systems) in 1976. In 1980,
Ted Codd, Pat Hayes, John McCarthy, and other AI & DB people
(including me) participated in an ACM-sponsored workshop that
tried to promote more collaboration. Unfortunately, it tended
to sound like separate conferences with interleaved talks. (08)
EJB
> I owe my respect for the data sciences to Stanley Y.W. Su at U. Florida
> and Gio Wiederhold at Stanford. (09)
In the 1980s, I participated in IFIP WG 2.6 on database, along with Gio.
The chair was Robert Meersman, who was trying to promoting collaboration
among the DB and KB researchers. I helped organize some conferences on
Data Semantics (which was treated as a topic, not a field). (010)
Among the speakers I invited were John McCarthy, Ray Reiter, and
Roger Schank. One logician type turned down the invitation because
it was "too applied". So we replaced him with Dana Scott. (011)
EJB
> This is not about renaming the field every 5 years; it is about
> realizing that the field has a name. (012)
I have no objection to any term used as a title of an article, a book,
or a conference. But when it is called a *field*, it tends to promote
fragmentation rather than collaboration. (013)
EJB
> Unfortunately, beginning about 15 years ago, the real illusion of
> progress -- XML and RDF data stores -- grew hundreds of would-be
> computer scientists building "new" information stores and database
> systems, with no knowledge of the data sciences, and therefore
> reinventing good and bad ideas from a 30-year literature they didn't read. (014)
I'm happy to end on a point I can strongly agree with. (015)
John (016)
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