[seqfan] Re: Additional keywords for OEIS

[Marc LeBrun]

It is my fond and enduring hope that the OEIS will someday enjoy the same
level of sophistication in its data science content as it does in its
mathematical content.

Features such as ad hoc keywords or categories are innocuous insofar as they
go, and useful within their scope, but they seem pretty primitive compared
to the current state-of-the-art in data modeling and knowledge engineering.

I recommend that anyone with an interest in these proposals with an eye
towards the future of the OEIS should look into things like the semantic web
to get a more up-to-date appreciation for where such technologies are going
(indeed, have already gone).

For example a keyword can be viewed as metadata that makes an assertion
*about a sequence*.  But instead of having "?" variants of every keyword one
can instead have a general kind of "meta" assertion *about an assertion*
that says it is conjectural.  And so on for many other applications (eg
assertions for provenance attribution, processing inferential consequences
of keywords such as prim==>nonn, etc etc).

The point is that there already exist sophisticated and elegant data
languages for representing this kind of information.  The OEIS should
consider adopting these approaches, rather than reinventing the wheel.

But heck, even if we just go ahead and kludge stuff up the good news is that
the total amount of actual data in the OEIS is truly miniscule by modern
standards.  This relative footprint will continue to shrink, at least while
the primary source of content continues to be entries hand-crafted by human
beings.  This means that building and maintaining useful informational
superstructures around the OEIS will lie well within the scope of
contemporary tools and techniques, and they can flourish off-site if not on.

With the current commercial interest around "big data" in many forms and its
consequent stimulation of academia, maybe we could get, say, a coven of grad
students to take a hands-on interest in this important aspect of the OEIS
and help us cook up something more au courant?