Showing posts with label Bellerophon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bellerophon. Show all posts

Monday, April 22, 2013

Do we need naming regulations for computer software?

Well, just saw this new paper: BMC Bioinformatics | Full text | Bellerophon: a hybrid method for detecting interchromo-somal rearrangements at base pair resolution using next-generation sequencing data.  Seems potentially interesting.  But one part of it struck me as very awkward.  You see, there already is a Bellerophon software program used by many in my field: Bellerophon: a program to detect chimeric sequences in multiple sequence alignments.  Seems like a very bad idea to have a new program with the same name as an existing (and still used) one in a similar general field (DNA sequence analysis).

This leads me to the following question - do we need some sort of naming guidelines or regulations for computer software?  We have all sorts of naming regulations and conventions for genes, for species, for other groups of taxa, and more.  Why not software tools?  But seriously, I don't think we need such a thing - we just need people to use Google and to do a little searching before they invent / publish a software package in case it's name is, well, already used.

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