Friday, February 11, 2005

The Mathematics Survey

Pointed out in the NSDL Scout Report v4 n3 (Feb 11, 2005). Note: the journal's been linked from our internal portal for a while, this is just more about the project.

This ambitious project seeks to solve a lot of what's wrong with mathematics information right now. Two (1, 2) new books came out in the last year trying to help users and librarians make some sort of in road into finding necessary math. While the books are very good the fragmentation and compartmentalization of the math knowledge is so severe that it's almost a lost battle.

Pitman, from Berkeley, has envisioned an open access set of survey journals and encyclopedias indexed by MSC (subject) and interlinked by author and collaboration graphs. Really quite a broad sweeping plan. Sounds like it could be done on a wiki (with editorial review). He hopes that the end information will be heavily cited (thus findable in WoS) and searchable on Google Scholar, MathSci, and Zentralblatt Math.

The first part of this is the probability and stochastic processes electronic journal: Probability Surveys.

Link this, if you will, to my suggestions (1, 2) of using established classification codes for new projects, etc. Note: Pitman doesn't propose a whole new classification scheme, he suggests the use of MSC. Perhaps mathematicians and statisticians should tag their posts and web pages with MSC codes? Maybe they already do?

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