Comments to draft report
From Informatics Europe
I have made a number of suggestions to the draft made by Bertrand see here. First of all, thank you to Bertrand for making this draft that I hope will develop into a report endorsed by Informatics Europe. This would be an important step forward for the association.
As you can see, many of the suggestions I have made are related to our use of "Informatics" and "Computer Science". I believe that it is important for Informatics Europe to work in a broader field than Computer Science. However, it would take much longer to make a report for research evaluation of all of Informatics. Therefore, I support that we adopt a report based on Betrand's draft but make it clear that it only adresses Computer Science.
I personally think that the first three sections of the report are the most urgent. The discussion of bibliometric methods is much braoder than just Computer Science, and I would not mind to move Bertrands important observations to a separate report on the use of bibliometric methods in Informatics.
Jørgen Staunstrup IT-University of Copenhagen E: jst@itu.dk T: +45 7218 5307
On March 17 I replaced the uploaded file with a new version where some further modifications are suggested.
Answer by Bertrand Meyer, 15 Feb 2008
Thanks, Jørgen , for your detailed analysis and critique. I agree in part but have two reservations: I would like to keep the message fairly simple; while it's OK to broaden the scope of "informatics", I am reluctant to include specific disciplines as in your suggested phrasing "e.g. aspects of sociology, healthcare, business processes, communication and media". Why these and not others, e.g. aerospace or electronic design? If we start citing one it's a slippery road.
Also, I am reluctant to drop computational science. We'll get into trouble with a whole segment of the community. The worst that can happen to this report is for someone from a CS department to step out and say "this report only represents the view of a subset of the community". That's precisely what you are trying to avoid by broadening the scope of the definition of informatics, but let's not restrict it in another area.
I would prefer to keep the part about bibliometry. We need to have a complete (although I hope still reasonably short) report that covers all the most important issues.
Any other opinions on these matters?
As soon as I have a minute (probably between now and Tuesday) I will propose a revision of the report that takes as many of your changes as possible, for further discussion.
Thanks again,
-- BM
Answer by Jørgen Staunstrup, March 17 2008
I am not proposing to broaden the report to cover all of Informatics. Actually my main suggestion is to do the opposite namely to clarify that the report is about Computer Science only (and not about the larger field of Informatics).
Jørgen Staunstrup
Revision by Bertrand Meyer, 20 May 2008
I wrote above that I would be done by "Tuesday". Well, this is Tuesday, albeit three months later... Sorry for the delay. Here is my revision, which integrates many of Jørgen's comments. For those that I did not include I hope you can understand my reasons. In any case I am very grateful for Jørgen's careful reading and all his great suggestions.
