Building a successful informatics project requires listening to users and future developers (triggering use, bug reporting, feature requesting, etc, etc). This is part of the whole software engineering process. Picking a good name for your project is important there, and IMHO part of bioinformatics. And this applies not just to software, but also to databases.
I would say these aspects are important to picking a name (the Google one a really important one):
- a unique name (so that search engines find your project, not another one)
- the name must be catchy (so that it is easy to remember, e.g. not too long)
- it must provide enough pointers to what it does
- do not overdo authenticity
The catchiness might be in the acronym. For example, the BioFoo projects have fairly good names, like BioJava, BioPython, etc. Easy to remember, short, unique. Jmol and PyMol are at the same level here. Stick to two syllables seems to work fine.
The StackOverflow answer points to including some theme in the name, like picking some history (greek) or localization (places, nordic), which fits the pattern that people prefer authenticity. The science equivalent of this is picking a well known scientific phrase or term as part of the name (which is why we see so many -omics fields). Things falling into this category would be something like the Java Epigenetics Toolkit (JET) (up for sale at $500; email me :).
... but is your question really related to bioinformatics ?
"supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" ? ... hum, no... forget it: 476000 hits in google.
I think making a project open and have a large community is an important aspect of informatics, any informatics, including bioinformatics. I know my ideas are typically not in line with the hot shots here, but I think this is a valid and important point here. Community building is part of bioinformatics. We have enough lousy bioinformatics projects with no impact, despite being great tools. I vote to reopen this question, and start taking this serious. Software Engeneering has been long not just coding, and BioStar would be good to follow that insight.
@Pierre... it's less to do with bioinformatics than Largest Bioinformatics Software Project? ?
No relevance according to the BioStar need!
ok; let's close it. Sorry Andra.
Good point. I just don't know if the naming is also an issue in other disciplines. I guess the same question could be asked about naming your just annotated gene.
how boring, I thought this was closed?
how boring, again (you can delete my comments as often as you wish)