Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Transitioning Applications to Ontologies

Transitioning Applications to Ontologies

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Multiple problems relating to contested proposed deletions.

This is one of several articles in a series that apparently are about minor European Union funded computer science projects. Thanks to User:Abductive, it came to light at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Insemtives that there existed an offsite project aimed at inserting multiple articles about minor EU research projects on Wikipedia. Template:Research-Project was apparently created to support this project. All of these articles appear to be created by interested parties. I'd call this a walled garden but for the fact that most of these articles appear to be orphaned.

No notability

The projects they describe, generally, do not carry any indicia of organizational notability. Most are referenced only to internal sites, or to related sites for this entire family of projects. In fact, but for the fact that they are apparently funded or organized by the European government, they have no real showing of minimal importance.

Patent nonsense

What's worse in my eyes is that the prose tends to be patent nonsense, the sort of thing that no one can reasonably be expected to make sense of. The technical term is complete bollocks. They generally are written in that vacuous jargon filled with buzzwords, uninformative abstractions, and glittering generalities. They read like a mixture of cod philosophy and 1997-era cyber-utopianism. Their text appears deliberately calculated to seem vaguely grandiose and to demonstrate fluency with the patter while failing to convey actual information:

The project will also tackle several major bottlenecks of knowledge technologies in the areas of semi-automatic creation of ontologies, automated methods for metadata creation and augmentation of legacy content, and distributed heterogeneous repositories.

Semantic Web Services, and Service-Oriented Architecture that host them, are expected by the project to make a significant contribution to the competitiveness of European ICT in the coming period, based on the fact that significant recent initiatives have built up strong foundations for practical semantic SOA. They have shown how new systems can profitably deploy semantics as a lingua franca for modeling the points of contact between software components at a higher level than previous technology.

User:DGG has suggested that these articles be merged into a variety of candidates such as Information Society Technologies or Sixth Framework Program. Given the low quality of the prose, I am unconvinced that these texts are worth preserving anywhere.

Related nominations

I am also nominating the following pages for essentially the same reasons as this:

Smerdis of Tlön (talk) 14:18, 11 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Speedy this patent nonsense. Gosox5555 (talk) 14:59, 11 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Four comments. I have researched some of the articles in Category:FP6 Projects and Category:FP7 Projects, and speedy/prod-tagged a few here and there, and AfD'd one. I have three comments; (1) many of these articles are copyright violations, since they are copied directly from the projects' websites. (2) Many of the surviving members of the FP6 category are notable, and many of the FP7 category are not notable, yet. If any are deleted, in a year or two they might attain notability, so this and other AfDs should not be used to justify a {{db-repost}} after 2011. (3) A merge is utterly inappropriate. Either a project is notable, or it isn't. (4) Keep in mind that these things are essentially miniature funding agencies, with a limited lifespan—probably set up that way by the Europeans to forestall their inclusion in future budgets. They exist only on paper and the web. For this reason, Google Scholar/WoS hits for these projects should be discounted; they are often just making an appearance in the acknowledgment section, being thanked for granting the money. Abductive (reasoning) 15:15, 11 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I was going to say delete all of them. However, in looking through the various nominations, I would propose an exemption for SQO-OSS based on the results found here [1] which appear to be reasonably in depth. All of the rest I agree with the nomination. As such Delete all except SQO-OSS. Quantpole (talk) 16:26, 11 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep and merge

First of all they are not nonsense. They are merely in a peculiar dialect, Information-scientist-talk. Starting with the most confusing, "ontology", for example, does not mean the traditional philosophical subject described in our article ontology; it means Ontology (information science), which essentially corresponds to "organization of knowledge" in a specific area or for a specific purpose-- in the approximate sense of library subject headings, or in a more complicated way, since it describes properties other than the subject, Dublin core. Most people will find that and our related articles rather confusing, but it is difficult to give straightforward explanations in ordinary language for elaborate formal constructs.

Abductive explains the problem with these articles rather well, except for not explaining why merging is impossible. We merge less-than-notable subjects into articles about things that are--taken together--notable. At the very worst, these could be merged into 6th framework. He doesn't want to do it, but I think he is essentially saying that WP:N applies to every part of an article, which is very far from policy.

My suggestion to merge would not merge very much of the content. I would in fact think it better to rewrite, except that I am not going to do it, having other priorities. Not that it cannot be done--the section the nominator quoted above can be roughly translated as

The project will also deal with several difficult areas in organizing information: the semi-automatic creation of schemes for organization, automatic methods for finding sets of descriptive terms, updating of older material, and integration of material organized for different purposes.

and

Our project will be important for the development of the European economy, since it is based on previously-completed work, which shows the practicality for development of more complicated computer programs covering multiple separate fields.

AfD is not for editing, though. DGG ( talk ) 18:10, 11 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]