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

DLI2 ALL PROJECTS MEETING, Edinburgh 2002

STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY

Outline
 ¥ project overview
 ¥ current status
 ¥ future issues

A Ôbottom-upÕ 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
ÔPagesÕ (@ 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