The hidden costs of GPL software?

From: Patrick Burns

I think John has exactly the right image -- index to a book --
but I disagree with his conclusions.

I read somewhere that an index should not be done by the
author.  It was probably written by someone who was bored
of indexing, but the logic was precisely because indices should
be about concepts.  The author of a package will have one
concept for a function but not all of the concepts that come
from various fields of study.  I suspect that no one outside of
finance would think to index "sd" with "volatility" for (a not very
good) example.

There could be an index builder that accepts a search phrase and
the function or package that is the successful answer to the search.
If this were open, then R users could contribute to the index who
don't feel qualified to submit code. It could also help diffuse the
frustration of taking too long to find a function by allowing a way
to insure that the exact same thing doesn't happen to others.

Amazon has a function that says those who bought "The Chicago
Manual of Style" also bought Strunk and White.

 In the same way,
the R index could provide a list of terms that overlap the given
search term.  For example if we search for "goodness of fit", then
"hypothesis test" might be one of the related terms that pops up.

No, I'm not volunteering to build the system.

Patrick Burns

Burns Statistics
patrick at burns-stat.com
+44 (0)20 8525 0696
http://www.burns-stat.com
(home of S Poetry and "A Guide for the Unwilling S User")

John Fox wrote:

Dear Duncan,

I don't think that there is an automatic, nearly costless 

way of providing

an effective solution to locating R resources. The problem 

seems to me to be

analogous to indexing a book. There's an excellent 

description of what that

process *should* look like in the Chicago Manual of Style, 

and it's a lot of

work. In my experience, most book indexes are quite poor, 

and automatically

generated indexes, while not useless, are even worse, since 

one should index

concepts, not words. The ideal indexer is therefore the 

author of the book.

I guess that the question boils down to how important is it 

to provide an

analogue of a good index to R? As I said in a previous 

message, I believe

that the current search facilities work pretty well -- about 

as well as one

could expect of an automatic approach. I don't believe that 

there's an

effective centralized solution, so doing something more 

ambitious than is

currently available implies farming out the process to 

package authors. Of

course, there's no guarantee that all package authors will 

be diligent

indexers. 

Regards,
John

--------------------------------
John Fox
Department of Sociology
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario
Canada L8S 4M4
905-525-9140x23604
http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox 
-------------------------------- 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch 
[mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of 

Duncan Murdoch

Sent: Monday, November 22, 2004 8:55 AM
To: Cliff Lunneborg
Cc: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: Re: [R] The hidden costs of GPL software?

On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 13:59:23 -0800, "Cliff Lunneborg"
<cliff at ms.washington.edu> quoted John Fox:

   

Why not, as previously has been proposed, replace the 

current static 

(and, in my view, not very useful) set of keywords in R 
     

documentation 
   

with the requirement that package authors supply their own 
     

keywords for 
   

each documented object? I believe that this is the intent of the 
concept entries in Rd files, but their use certainly is not 
     

required or 
   

even actively encouraged. (They're just mentioned in 

passing in the 

Writing R Extensions manual.
     

That would not be easy and won't happen quickly.  There are some
problems:

- The base packages mostly don't use  \concept. (E.g. base 
has 365 man pages, only about 15 of them use it).  Adding it 
to each file is a fairly time-consuming task.

- Before we started, we'd need to agree as to what they are for.
Right now, I think they are mainly used when the name of a 
concept doesn't match the name of the function that 
implements it, e.g.
"modulo", "remainder", "promise", "argmin", "assertion".  The 
need for this usage is pretty rare.  If they were used for 
everything, what would they contain?

- Keywording in a useful way is hard.  There are spelling 
issues (e.g. optimise versus optimize); our fuzzy matching 
helps with those.
But there are also multiple names for the same thing, and 
multiple meanings for the same name.

Duncan Murdoch