Similar database projects, such The Immune Epitope Database and Analysis Resource (IEDB) (www.immuneepitope.org), have reported that inconsistent usage of terminology by the community led to reproduction of work and inconsistently annotated resources (20).
The same goes for inconsistent usage.
Inconsistent usage of language impedes scientific progress and the utility of scientific concepts in management and conservation.
As a company, Flowtab was beleaguered by inconsistent usage; most folks just didn't go back to the same bar every week, so a new user might enjoy Flowtab, but not use the service again for months until they were back in the bar they signed up in.
It might be an inconsistent usage of quotation marks for strings, misleading variable names or anything along those lines.
The paper suggested that a better term like "variation" and "alteration" might be useful, but its inconsistent usage in the scientific world makes it problematic.
Some of the issues that were routinely addressed included poor naming of resources, misapplication of ontology classes and properties, inconsistent usage of terminology in free text fields, insufficient annotation for resource types, lack of links between records, and incorrect, outdated, or broken links on the records.
We would recommend removing this word given recent concerns about the methodology used in the original studies (Wu et al., Science 2011; Koren et al., PLoS Comp Biol 2013), the inconsistent usage of this term in the field, the lack of any quantitative enterotype clustering in the current paper, and the focus of this study on P. copri instead of more general patterns in community structure.
Here, we begin by surveying the format and rationale of existing histone nomenclature, extracting general usage principles and noting some examples of potential conflicts arising from inconsistent use.
This is particularly interesting when dealing with user-generated texts from the Web, which often display inconsistent capitalization usage, a potential problem for POS taggers [35].
Hence, the promiscuous appellation "terror" and "state sponsor of terrorism" in accusations that target Iran - however inconsistent that usage is with the terminology applied to the behavior (real or imagined) of other states.
