Authors: Andrei Alexandru and Gabriel Ciobanu (Institute of Computer Science Iași)
Journal reference: Romanian Journal of Information Science and Technology, Volume 15, Number 2, pp. 79-90 (2012).
Comments: I must admit that this paper hailing from the 'Romanian Journal of Information Science and Technology' (ROMJIST) didn't exactly fill me with confidence. My scepticism was not primarily driven by the 'Romanian' in the title - many journals and conferences are sponsored by scientific societies linked to specific countries or regions, and not necessarily the 'obvious' countries either - the conference WoLLIC, through which I have published, has significant sponsorship from Brazil, for example.
Rather, it's the 'Information Science and Technology' in the title that set off alarm bells. How does a journal ensure high quality and credible reviewing when their remit covers the entire field of computer science? If you're the Journal of the ACM that's possible because you've set yourself up as a flagship journal for the whole subject, with a seriously high powered and diverse board of editors (Nature is a more famous and even more wide-ranging example of this sort of model). But for less high profile journals (a category in which ROMJIST obviously sits) a larger degree of specialisation seems essential if quality is to be maintained.
Setting that aside, Google Scholar has recommended this paper to me, and so I read it with an open mind. The reason for the recommendation is clear enough, as it deals my speciality of nominal sets, a variant of set theory in which each element is linked to a 'finite support' of names. I discussed the computational applications of this model in my first article on this blog. It's a natural and common move to reinterpret mathematical concepts from 'ordinary' set theory into nominal set theory - my own work on equational logic, which I discussed briefly last week, can be seen in this light. This paper makes this move on event structures, abstract structures in which causality and conflict between events can be modelled.
Here's the problem though - nowhere in this paper is it explained why creating a nominal variant of event structures might be a good idea. No examples are given of these new nominal event structures, no problems are solved using them, no 'further work' section suggests what might be done with them next, and no interesting theoretical or mathematical issues are brought to light. The small number of novel proofs in this paper are all completely routine checks that finite (or sometimes empty) support properties are not violated by the new definitions. I don't intend this blog to be a space where I 'review' papers in the academic sense, with all the controversy that process inevitably generates, but I can't report on the usefulness of Google Scholar Updates without indicating where the papers I read are not useful, and this is certainly such an instance.
Setting that aside, Google Scholar has recommended this paper to me, and so I read it with an open mind. The reason for the recommendation is clear enough, as it deals my speciality of nominal sets, a variant of set theory in which each element is linked to a 'finite support' of names. I discussed the computational applications of this model in my first article on this blog. It's a natural and common move to reinterpret mathematical concepts from 'ordinary' set theory into nominal set theory - my own work on equational logic, which I discussed briefly last week, can be seen in this light. This paper makes this move on event structures, abstract structures in which causality and conflict between events can be modelled.
Here's the problem though - nowhere in this paper is it explained why creating a nominal variant of event structures might be a good idea. No examples are given of these new nominal event structures, no problems are solved using them, no 'further work' section suggests what might be done with them next, and no interesting theoretical or mathematical issues are brought to light. The small number of novel proofs in this paper are all completely routine checks that finite (or sometimes empty) support properties are not violated by the new definitions. I don't intend this blog to be a space where I 'review' papers in the academic sense, with all the controversy that process inevitably generates, but I can't report on the usefulness of Google Scholar Updates without indicating where the papers I read are not useful, and this is certainly such an instance.
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