User talk:Ruud Koot/Categorisation scheme (computer science)

This is a very good start. I see you label it as the ACM scheme but my understanding is that if we find a reason to deviate from that taxonomy that we will make the change here. I will use the strucutre I find here from now on so if there are changes from ACM, I will carry them forward in my work. If I find that it is not working for some reason I will note that here and begin a separate discussion under the most appropriate category discussion page.

My plan is to proceed top-down so my intention is to ensure that the Computer Science category does not contain articles that are obviously meant for much lower categories. I hadn't intended to immediately build out to the lowest level of the taxonomy since some of these articles might be single leaves at this time. In some cases I only push the leaf down one level if it is not immediately self-evident what the lowest node should be. That explains why you saw things in Software that more properly should be in Programming Languages or lower. I will try to do better but be assured that I will clean up things like that as I proceed down the branch.

Please feel free to give me suggestions as to which sub-category seem to be in the greatest need. I will be spending a significant amount of time doing this over the next few days and I hope to have the Computer Science category done in the next day or two. My thought was to proceed to the Software category but I'll gladly work on another if need be.

My personal motivation for this is to reaquaint myself with the broad spectrum of computer science topics in preparation for some research I want to do. I is an easy way to brush up and do good at the same time. (my cs degree is from Illinois Inst of Tech, Chicago IL). df Dfletter 16:56, 24 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Is your intention to create a complete taxonomy different from ACMs? I don't understand why you would want to. Please share you issues with theirs.

Also, in the current strucutre you are building out, why would AI be both a sibling to and a child of Computer Science? Or is this an artifact of a work in progress?

My interest is also in theoretical computer science so I'll be atuned to your issues. I suggest that you respond here rather than my user page so we can keep the thread together.

ciao Dfletter 17:15, 24 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Theory of computation is redundant. We already have Category:Computation and Category:Complexity theory. Might I suggest, that you browse around a bit first to you know what is already there? —R. Koot 17:12, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Dfletter"

I'll be happy to use Theoretical Computer Science as an alias for the ACM category Theory of Computation if that is what we agree. It is difficult to properly categorize if we do not agree on the taxonomy. I look forward to hearing about your concerns. I have participated in several aligned efforts and the creation of a new taxonomy is challenging. If there is no compelling reason to ignore ACMs, we should use that as a parallel tree. There is no reason you, or anyone else, can categorize articles to alternate categories.

Dfletter 17:24, 24 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia categories are not a strict tree, more of a directed graph (although it is preferrable to limit the cycles). Artificial intelligence is both a sibling and a child, because artificial intelligence and computer science have a significant overlap. People expect to find the category artificial intelligence in the category computer science, but also both directly under the category science. This would one of the major reasons directly using the ACM scheme wouldn't work. Further more articles in an enclyclopedia are rather different from papers. For example, you would need a separate category to keep track of all the articles on complexity classes and keep them seperate from articles on computational complexity in general. (The mathematics category doesn't use the AMS scheme for the same reasons). —R. Koot 17:27, 24 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Without the cycles we have a tree. I'll gladly defer to you when you want to create a cycle as in the case of Artificial Intelligence. However you still haven't addressed my most immediate concern of ACM's decomposition. I am also looking for your acknowledgement that the category Theoretical Computer Science is equivalent to Theory of Computation is it is further broken down in the ACM classification. Once you do that, I will code things there. cheers Dfletter 17:44, 24 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Take a look now. My proposal for Category:Theoretical computer science is very similar to the ACM category Theory of Computation. —R. Koot 17:50, 24 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There are only two changes to your mapping that I am going to make. First, software does not equate to software engineering. There are many more topics as you can see from ACM's classification. Second, mathematics of computation is very much a part of computer science although it obviously also belongs to the category of mathematics. Our project is to categorize computer science. We must let the subject matter experts in mathematics categorize the articles according to their taxonomy.

Dfletter 18:41, 24 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Given the subcategories is think it does refer to software engineering. Category:Software is already reserved for articles on real software (e.g. Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop...). (I don' think this matters much as all the subcategories of this categories should be explicitly pointed to some Wikipedia category anyways. —R. Koot 19:08, 24 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

--- I agree: we will map acm's programming techniques to programming paradigms. What do you mean "black hole"?

Reserved by whom? Software is too broad a term to have it coopted as a catch-all for all application software packages. When I turn my attention to that category, I will create a sub-category for those. ACM would categorize it differently but I agree that to the average user, they will look to software first and then see the category for application software.

Black hole: if you put anything in it, it will be lost. It needs to be cleaned up first. Reserved: It is already used for this purpose. You can't (just) change that. —R. Koot 19:20, 24 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

---

We can either proceed top-down or bottom up. It is just as lost if its buried in a catch-all like computer science. As I mentioned, if you give me a list of the worst black holes, the article will be properly categorized as I work that category.

Reserved by whom? If we agree that it is within the domain of computer science and we are the ones who are organizing the material, it is up to us to say how the category is organized. Again, I'm not understanding your objection. Dfletter 20:10, 24 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]