From: Isabel Drost <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Debian-AI Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2008 11:17:28 +0100
> If your goal is to provide a comprehensive repository of AI software, I think > you have forgotten some rather important AI projects on your list. You might > want to have a look at the following two lists: > > http://ml-site.grantingersoll.com/index.php?title=Existing_Learning_Tools > > http://mloss.org/software/ The software Isabel Drost has mentioned is an example of the thousands of high-end systems for which no packages exist. The website http://frdcsa.onshore.net/frdcsa/external is really a list of software that has been acquired and packages attempted. The list of all known software (software ontology) has not been made, see [0] for a description of the attempt so far. The issue of "automatic packaging" is IMHO a red-herring. Even if the rough packages are done completely by hand, the problem remains that there is a lot of useful, properly licensed software for which no package exists. Consequently, the software has not been mapped to the FHS properly, it is more difficult to develop additional software which depends upon it, it is more difficult for any user to install the software, etc. The benefits of packaging are great. It promotes code reuse, and also makes it easier to discover functionality. Any ideas as to how we can make all these packages? Is there any interest in some kind of effort aimed at this, to increase the package coverage? It's not possible to spam WNPP, nor create all the packages myself. Can Debian create some kind of official USE AT YOUR OWN RISK repository of user-contributed packages? Would people like to work on making rough packages from the list? Would they like to write tools that reduce rough package creation to a wizard, so that Linux users with no Debian expertise with an interest in having packages can create them (and link to this tool from Sourceforge and Freshmeat saying: "Want a package of this?"). Can we start a business where we contract to make packages for people? Can we build mappings between packages in Debian and other distributions and automatically convert these using Alien plus some tools to correct dependencies? Would anyone like to join my project to create these packages, or give me advice how to go about creating them? I've contacted http://debian.pkgs.cpan.org/ and expect to help with that effort. Thank you very much for the link. Kind regards, Andrew Dougherty P.S. The packages of all FRDCSA internal codebases are being tweaked for release, so these may be available within the next few weeks, if anyone is interested. [0] The CSO system (http://frdcsa.onshore.net/frdcsa/internal/cso) has a MySQL database of all the software from Freshmeat, Sourceforge, and several other major software indexes, data from the FLOSSMole project. (linking redundant entries can be done using the (non-free) MNOP tool (http://www.autonlab.org/autonweb/10514), but they've not yielded their software.) The problem is similar to the problem of "Web People Search" http://nlp.cs.swarthmore.edu/semeval/tasks/task13/summary.shtml. The process of finding and inserting metasites such as the ones Isabel Drost has mentioned is more complex. An information extraction technique called MDR (http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/liu03mining.html) has been mostly implemented for extracting software from metasites, and automatic detection of metasites using one of the projects called WebKB (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~webkb/) has been experimented with. The most practical method is to just do it semi-automatically using the RADAR system (http://frdcsa.onshore.net/frdcsa/internal/radar). But the best method would be for people to submit metasites to a repository and then either automatically or semiautomatically process those. Once the packages are found, their capabilities need to be indexed/formalized. This task is beyond the scope of this letter. Most of the tools which are necessary to accomplish this are however not packaged. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
