STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY
Progress and Prospects
http://plato.stanford.edu


Colin Allen
Associate Editor / Principal Programming Consultant
(Philosophy, Texas A&M University)
colin@plato.stanford.edu

Edward N. Zalta, Principal Editor
Uri Nodelman, Assistant Editor

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STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY


Outline
• project overview
• current status
• future issues

A ‘bottom-up’ perspective on DL issues

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STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY


Project Overview


• Dynamic Reference Work (4 yr cycle)
• Academically authoritative, high quality
• Quarterly archives for scholarly use
• Small staff (~1.5 FTE)
• Volunteer authors & subject editors
- from 30+ countries / 5 continents
• Low cost = long-term sustainability

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STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY


Statistics as of June 18, 2002


Editorial Board 71
Authors 632
Commissioned Entries 724
Projected Entries +1500
Entries Online 307
Entries Updated 112
Average Words Per Entry 9405
‘Pages’ (@ 600 words/page) 4812

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STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY


Publication Rate



Date Phase Published Total
9/1995-8/1998 Prior to Public Funding 78 78
9/1998-8/2000 NEH Grant #PA-23167-98 53 131
9/2000-5/2001 NSF Grant, Prior to Tracking System 38 169
5/2001-6/2002 NSF Grant, with Tracking System Online 138 307

Projected: 450 entries by 8/2002 (end of NSF IIS-9981549)

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STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY
Measuring Impact


• Readership
- volume: > 100,000 hits / week
- composition (survey): students (52%), teachers (14%),
researchers (9%) & general public (25%)
- locations: > 160 countries

• Web Visibility and Authoritativeness
- syllabus links (400-500) and peer site links (edu etc.)
- Google rankings

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STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY
Google Rankings (March 17, 2002)
Searched topics of first 100 published entries

e.g.:
Alfred North Whitehead 1996 1
Ancient Skepticism 1997 1
Animal Consciousness 1995 1
Aristotle's Political Theory 1998 1
Arthur Prior 1996 1
Artifact 1999 16
Bertrand Russell 1995 4
Category Theory 1996 3
Causal Processes 1996 1
Cognitive Science 1996 28
etc.

76% returned 1st ; 94% returned in top 10

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STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY
Google PageRank Explained
excerpted from http://www.google.com/technology/index.html


PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.

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STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY
What the Future Holds (??)


MEDIUM TERM GOALS

• 450 entries by 8/2002 (5 yrs public funding)
• 2 yrs additional public funding==>750 entries ("maturity")
• Continued free access -
essential for continued web visibility

LONG TERM NEEDS

• 1.5-2.5 FTE staff + server costs (US $150K-250K/year)

STRATEGIES FOR LONG-TERM SUSTAINABILITY

• Endowment building (US $3-5 million)
• Subscriptions to archives
(locus of scholarly value)

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STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY
Constraints and Needs


• Author and Subject Editor "Good Will"

• Authors maintain own documents
- Simple, Understandable Format
- HTML (XML has 40% penalty for authors; J.Bosak Nature)

• Continuing software development for
- automation of routine tasks
- support of common author and editor tasks
- automated integration with OAI, Dublin core, etc.???

DLI2 ALL PROJECTS MEETING, Edinburgh 2002