New tags for biology and medicine.

[Steffen Moeller]

Hello,

On Tuesday 04 September 2007 12:10:30 Benjamin Mesing wrote:
> Generally speaking the proposed tags are relativly detailed. I believe
> this level of detail is required only by biologists or people in the
> medical field. Thus we need to decide, if those details should become
> part of the main vocabulary database. Another way would be to provide
> them in a different vocabulary/tag database - debtags supports multiple
> of those.
>
[...]
> +Tag: field::biology:structural
> +Description: Structural biology
> + Software useful to model tridimentional structures.
> +
>
> This is probably a reasonable distinction, though we have to decide if
> we want such a fine-grained separation of the "field" facet. We would
> also end up with needing the same level of detail for electronics,
> chemistry, physics,...

Yes, I think we do. The following two reasons jump to mind:
 * When thinking about automated installations of software (i.e. in grid 
computing) we need a language that allows us to talk about what is eligible 
for installations and what is not. Debtags are not perfect and other efforts 
describing various kinds of properties that software can have, there is 
nothing as sweet as Debtags to talk about what the software is actually 
doing.
 * Debian integrates communities. This is my way to read Custom Debian 
Distributions that are basically saying they people flock together to extend 
Debian towards a particular direction. Specialisation of Debian comes with a 
specialisation of terms. It is natural.

I like the above sketched suggestion to allow for disjunct sets of facets that 
are maintained by different communities. It would seem natural to me to 
eventually allow for sub-facets of some kind with a higher number of ":" in 
their IDs to thus allow for an easier reduction of complexity. Though ... 
well ... it may not be needed tomorrow.

Many greetings

Steffen


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
Url : http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debtags-devel/attachments/20070904/ddd31431/attachment.pgp