New tags for biology and medicine.

[Benjamin Mesing]

On Thu, 2007-08-23 at 22:36 +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> Hi Debtags team !
> 
> This is the monthly reminder that the Debian-Med team proposed new tags
> in May,
> 
> http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debtags-devel/2007-May/001630.html
> http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debtags-devel/2007-July/001658.html
> 
> Have a nice day,
> 

My opinion is, that many of the tags you propose are only for a very
special target user group. My understanding is, that the official
Debtags vocabulary should focus on the main user base (whoever that
might be, and my idea of it is probably coloured by my own background,
though I try to stay objective..) and in all other areas only give a
very rough separation.
That being said, I see two ways to keep the distinction between the main
categorization and the detailed tags you propose:

     1. Provide a separate tag database/vocabulary
        Advantages: 
              * clean separation
              * you keep the full expressivity of the main vocabulary
                (i.e. you can add tags into the other facets like
                works-with, made-of...)
        Disadvantages: 
              * additional administrative overhead for hosting the tag
                database
              * additional overhead for users of this tag database,
                which must be enabled one way or another
              * tagging infrastructure must be provided (or happen
                centrally by the Debian-med team)
 2. Add a facet biology:: (and if neccessary medical:: or something
        like that) and put the tags in there
        Advantages/Disadvantages: well, the opposite of 1.
        This approach is currently use e.g. for junior::, security:: or
        devel::.

We had a short discussion on IRC about your proposal, and as far as we
are concerned, Option 2. would be Ok for us (obviously Option 1. would
also be ok, since we wouldn't have anything to do with that ;-). We
would like to put the following tags in the main hierarchy either way:
      * field::medicine
      * use::comparison (though Enrico warned about the name - we would
        imagine a diff tool from that, but I think it is just fine to
        use it with different interpretation)
      * use::analysis
      * field::medicine:imaging (I wouldn't want to place that into
        biology:: and don't see the need for a med:: facet yet)

If there are no objections I will add those in roughly a week.

And the following tags in the biology facet (note that I have adapted
some of the tag names):
      * ::bioinformatics, ::molecular-biology, ::structural-biology
        (though those could go into field::biology if you rather see
        that)
      * ::format:aln, ::format:fasta, ::format:nexus (or would you
        rather have aln-format, fasta-format,..?)
      * ::emboss
      * ::nucleic-acids, ::peptides
      * ::alignment-analysis, ::phylogeny-analysis (if you really think
        this is neccessary)

Once this is agreed upon and the remaining questions are answered, I
will add the biology facet.

We are not sure about the ::algorithm:* thing. They are not biology
specific so it would be odd to put them there. Besides, Enrico pointed
out, that nearly everything (at least the software) is made-of
algorithms. Additionally, to me the whole made-of facet does not seem
very concise anyways...

Regards Ben