[Babase] One user's suggestion on rank data

Karl O. Pinc kop at meme.com
Fri Oct 13 15:17:18 EDT 2006


On 10/12/2006 04:43:53 PM, Russ Van Horn wrote:
<snip>

>   I agree that developing a set of criteria and measures of rank  
> uncertainty would be challenging, and that in any case it might make  
> sense for those criteria to vary depending on the project at hand. I  
> hadn't realized that the matrices for each month are in BABASE. Upon  
> reflection, I think having access to the monthly matrices would allow  
> users to evaluate the sample size used in determining an individual's  
> rank within the context of the sample sizes of the other individuals;  
> would it be possible to construct links/relations in the database  
> from the ranks back to the monthly matrices?

I think the thing to do is to develop and document relevant queries
that produce the interactions and the individual's ranked.
The matrices themselves are not stored in babase as explicit
database entities, they are dynamically generated from the data
in the interactions, parts and members tables. (There are manual
records kept of the actual matrix, but there should be nothing
special about these records.)  My assumption is that we don't
have enough collective experience to know exactly what
metrics are useful in the evaulation of the ranks, otherwise
we could store something.  With a set of queries on hand
that produce the data used to generate the ranks we can
explore the possible metrics and see which are useful.

Karl <kop at meme.com>
Free Software:  "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
                  -- Robert A. Heinlein



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