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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Edinburgh 2002
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