David,
On 8/22/2011 9:55 PM, David Booth wrote:
On Mon, 2011-08-22 at 20:27 -0400, Patrick Durusau wrote:
[ . . . ]
The use of CAS identifiers supports searching across vast domains of
*existing* literature. Not all, but most of it for the last 60 or so
years.
That is non-trivial and should not be lightly discarded.
BTW, your objection is that "non-licensed systems" cannot use CAS
identifiers? Are these commercial systems that are charging their
customers? Why would you think such systems should be able to take
information created by others?
Using the information associated with an identifier is one thing; using
the identifier itself is another. I'm sure the CAS numbers have added
non-trivial value that should not be ignored. But their business model
needs to change. It is ludicrous in this web era to prohibit the use of
the identifiers themselves.
If there is one principle we have learned from the web, it is enormous
value and importance of freely usable universal identifiers. URIs rule!
http://urisrule.org/
:)
Well, I won't take the bait on URIs, ;-), but will note that re-use of
identifiers of a sort was addressed quite a few years ago.
See: /*Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co.*/, 499
U.S. 340 (1991) or follow this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural
The circumstances with CAS numbers is slightly different because to get
access to the full set of CAS numbers I suspect you have to sign a
licensing agreement on re-use, which makes it a matter of *contract* law
and not copyright.
Perhaps they should increase the limits beyond 10,000 identifiers but
the only people who want the whole monty as it were are potential
commercial competitors.
The people who publish the periodical "Brain" for example at $10,000 a
year. Why should I want the complete set of identifiers to be freely
available to help them?
Personally I think given the head start that the CAS maintainers have on
the literature, etc., that different models for use of the identifiers
might suit their purposes just as well. Universal identifiers change
over time and my concern is with the least semantic friction and not as
much with how we get there.
Hope you are having a great day!
Patrick
--
Patrick Durusau
patr...@durusau.net
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)
Another Word For It (blog): http://tm.durusau.net
Homepage: http://www.durusau.net
Twitter: patrickDurusau
