Qualitas Corpus Domain Model

In order for any corpus to be useful, it must be representative. If it only contains particular kinds of things, or the things come from a limited source, or similar restrictions on its contents, then there is the possibility of bias that will impact the validity of any conclusions drawn from its use (specifically, threats to external validity). Ideally, the corpus should contain a representative sample of its population, but in reality this is impractical. This is acknowledged in fields such as computational linguistics, which makes heavy use of corpora of language use. Hunston observes that "The real question as regards representativeness is how the balance of a corpus should be taken into account when interpreting data from that corpus." [Hun2002] That is the philosophy of the Qualitas Corpus.

To support understanding the balance, or representativeness, of the Qualitas Corpus, there needs to be some way to characterise its representativeness. This is the goal of the Qualitas Corpus Domain Model. It provides a set of categories and all entries in the corpus are classified into one of the categories. Hopefuly looking at what is in each category gives a sense of what is "in" the corpus.

The domain model described below is just a start. There are some issues with it:

• It only contains categories in which there is at least one system. This means any "gaps" (sensible categories for which there are no entries in the corpus) are hard to see.
• The categories are somewhat subjective in nature. There is on operational means to classify a given system.
• Some categories are perhaps a bit too broad, or not very coherent.
• It's not clear that it makes sense to use a single dimension of categorisation.

3D/graphics/media

Systems that provide some sort of media support, in particular graphics. This should be compared with diagram/visualisation.

IDE

Provides a tool that supports code development (particularly the edit/execute cycle).

SDK

Provides the base libraries for programming in a particular language.

database

Provides some sort of database management.

diagram/visualisation

Provides diagrams or visual presentation of some sort of data.

games

Is either a game, or provides support for game development.

middleware

Provides support for typically middleware services, such as transactions, persistence, concurrency.

parsers/generators/make

Provides support for creating parsers or building systems.

programming language

Provides a new programming language.

References

[Hun2002]

Susan Hunston 'Corpora in Applied Linguistics' Cambridge University Press 2002.