lundi 29 septembre 2008

A general practitioner for computer science?

A general practitioner for computer science?

When someone feels sick, when he has a "health problem" he usually goes to see a GP. He doesn't directly go to see a podiatrist, a chiropractor, a cardiologist, a surgeon, a dermatologist, a neurologist, etc. He sets an appointment with the general practitioner because this physician has a broad understanding of all illnesses and he does not restrict his practice to any particular field. The GP provides an important service: he evaluates the problems, identifies the needs, builds a general diagnosis of the problem and when it is a known problem and general enough he points to a generic solution (of the shelves of the pharmacy), if not, he knows enough about the specialization domains to route the patient to the right specialist or to a group of them if needed.

The general practitioner is a generalist i.e. he is the specialist of health problem analysis and pre-processing.

When someone feels information is not processed as it should be, when he has a "computing problem / informatics problem" who should he turn to? Some turn directly to the first computer specialist they can find: a database specialist, an interface designer, a C++ programmer, a system administrator, a data miner, etc. Where is the general practitioner for computer science? Who is the computer generalist one should turn to when one has an information system problem? The generalist who builds a general diagnosis of an informatics problem, the one who knows typical problems and of the shelve solutions and who knows enough about the specialization domains in computer science to route the user to the right specialist or to a group of them if needed.

We need a computer science generalist, a specialist of informatics problem analysis and need analysis.

vendredi 26 septembre 2008

IRC Ontology: an RDF vocabulary to represent IRC logs.

We just released an ontology for IRC logs available as an RDF vocabulary. It is available as RDF/XML and has for namespace http://ns.inria.fr/irc/2008/09/25/voc . Its initial version was authored by Adil El Ghali and this new release has for additional contributors Fabien Gandon and Tom Morris. You can browse it using a number of services: