Thursday, 7 June 2012

Holy moley - A blessed ordering of atoms

I know I shouldn't cast the first stone but sometimes only a saint could turn the other cheek.

Here's some background from Wikipedia:
In computer science, canonicalization (...also sometimes standardization or normalization) is a process for converting data that has more than one possible representation into a "standard", "normal", or canonical form.
Not to be confused with Canonization...
Canonization (or canonisation) is the act by which a Christian church declares a deceased person to be a saint, upon which declaration the person is included in the canon, or list, of recognized saints.
...and here are some papers from JCICS:
MOLGEN-CID - A Canonizer for Molecules and Graphs Accessible through the Internet 
The Signature Molecular Descriptor. 4. Canonizing Molecules Using Extended Valence Sequences

A search of ACS publications shows seven references to canonizer in total, and 32 references to canonization.

Okay, so I'm a native speaker, and yes, I mispell words too. I still think it's funny. :-)
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4 comments:

  1. Volker Hähnke15 June 2012 at 16:55

    I have faced the problem of how to call it myself a couple of times, as my previous work dealt with unambiguous representations of molecules as line notations. And as far as I know, it really is called "canonization" in the context of graph theory, not "canonicalization". It didn't make any sense to me, so I went with what I could find in the already available literature and did not worry any further.

    But sometimes it caused some amusement when I presented my work to native speaker. I think the real meaning of "canonization" is not apparent to non-native speakers. We just hear "canon..." and think we know or can guess what it means, so I myself never had a real problem using that word.

    It would be interesting to know where the usage of "canonization" in this context originated from.


    All the best,
    Volker

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  2. Noel O'Boyle16 June 2012 at 11:31

    Hi Volker, indeed it may not so simple a story as I presented. It would be good to find out for sure if it is canonization for graph theory as I guess that makes it a more legitimate choice. It is difficult though as a native speaker (especially from Ireland!) to use canonization in a technical sense.

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  3. Egon Willighagen22 June 2012 at 08:02

    Noel, what do you make of this Wikipedia article then?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_canonization

    That seems to support Volker's comment...

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  4. Noel O'Boyle22 June 2012 at 10:36

    I saw it, but there's some discussion on the talk page about whether it's the right title or not.

    But yes, I realise it's inconsistent to quote Wikipedia articles as evidence, and then dismiss another Wikipedia article that disagrees. That's the difference between a blog post and a journal article :-)

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