[Dspace-general] Week 2: Statistics

[Mark H. Wood]

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 09:44:45AM -0500, Dorothea Salo wrote:
> 2008/8/25 Mark H. Wood <mwood at iupui.edu>:
> > What might be helpful is to provide some views or stored procedures
> > that stat. tools could use to classify observations.  Such tools
> > usually have good facilities for poking around in databases, but could
> > perhaps use help in getting the information they need without having to
> > understand (and track changes to!) the fulness of DSpace's schema.
> 
> Interesting. Where would this leave the average repository manager who
> isn't using Stata, but just wants some numbers to show people?

Well, it depends on which numbers are wanted.  I do think there will
be some reports that are popular enough, and easy enough to get right,
that they should be built in.  The support for external tools would be
aimed at people who do want to use them.  What sort of data would be
useful to the manager who isn't into heavy statistical analysis, which
aren't likely to be provided as built-ins?

Where I'm going is:

o  The realm of reasonable possibilities for statistical analysis and
   presentation of DSpace activity is rather huge;

o  people who understand statistical processing have already figured
   out the hard parts of analysis and presentation;

o  the tail should not be allowed to wag the dog -- we want
   statistics, but that's subordinate to building excellend document
   repository software.  Part of, important, but in a supporting role.

So I am hoping that we can mostly satisfy most people with relatively
modest built-in statistical support, and take care of the other cases
with modest support for the development of external reporting
mechanisms.  This being a community, I imagine that some will develop
external solutions that they can share.

This is one reason why I think that it should be as easy as possible
for multiple stat. projects to tap into built-in streams of
observations.  Different sites have different needs, and I think we
need to be able to easily play with various ways of doing stat.s.  I'm
not convinced that we are going to understand the need sufficiently
without getting into the field a selection of solutions that can be
easily snapped in and tried by a sizable number of sites.  There are a
number of good attempts now, but it's not easy to install them and
that limits the amount of experience we can gather.

-- 
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer   mwood at IUPUI.Edu
Typically when a software vendor says that a product is "intuitive" he
means the exact opposite.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/dspace-general/attachments/20080826/d1873706/attachment.bin