Subject: [CODE4LIB] Open, public standards v. pay per view standards and usage

From: Walter Lewis <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:22:03 -0400

Are there any blindingly obvious examples of instances where
     a) a standards group produced a standard published by a body which 
charged for access to it
and
    b) a alternative standards groups produced a competing standard that 
was openly accessible
and the work of group a) was rendered totally irrelevant because most 
non-commercial work ignored it in favour of b).

My instinct is to quote the battle between OSI (ISO) and TCP/IP (IETF 
RFCs).  Does that strike others as appropriate?

Any examples closer to the library world?

Walter Lewis

---

From: Andrew Hankinson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:28:04 -0400

Have a look at the ongoing battles between MPEG4 and Ogg for the  
browser video space. I don't know of your second criteria for b),  
however - not many people are using Ogg (yet)

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/07/06/ogg-theora-h-264-and-the-html-5-browser-squabble/

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/decoding-the-html-5-video-codec-debate.ars

-Andrew

On 13-Jul-09, at 12:22 PM, Walter Lewis wrote:

>    a) a standards group produced a standard published by a body  
> which charged for access to it
> and
>   b) a alternative standards groups produced a competing standard  
> that was openly accessible
> and the work of group a) was rendered totally irrelevant because  
> most non-commercial work ignored it in favour of b).
>
> My instinct is to quote the battle between OSI (ISO) and TCP/IP  
> (IETF RFCs).  Does that strike others as appropriate?
>

---

From: David Fiander <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Jul 2009 13:11:16 -0400

Walter,

Well the obvious commercial example, sort of is that old favourite:
Beta (for which Sony charged a license fee and controlled who could
produce media) vs VHS (for which there was either no fee or a much
lower one, and not oversight of media producers).

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 12:28 PM, Andrew
Hankinson<[email-masked]> wrote:
> Have a look at the ongoing battles between MPEG4 and Ogg for the browser
> video space. I don't know of your second criteria for b), however - not many
> people are using Ogg (yet)
>
>>  b) a alternative standards groups produced a competing standard that was
>> openly accessible

---

From: William Wueppelmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2009 09:51:41 -0400

That might not be the best analogy. The most commonly-cited reason for 
Beta losing out to VHS seems to be the initial limitation of Beta to 
1-hour tapes, which wasn't enough to record a movie from TV, or to play 
back a rented one without switching tapes partway through. By the time 
Beta increased its tape length, VHS had basically caught up from a 
quality standpoint, and its market share had reached the tipping point 
anyway.

I'm not entirely sure that TCP/IP and the other IETF RFCs became 
established because of restrictions placed on OSI. I was under the 
impression that OSI was also insanely complicated and that the IETF 
standards were much cheaper to implement from a technical standpoint. 
And, from a product standpoint, in the mid-90s, there were still a lot 
of bets being placed on closed online services like AOL, MSN, and 
Compuserve.

-William

---

From: Walter Lewis <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2009 10:35:51 -0400

William Wueppelmann wrote:
> [snip]
Not to mention the book I once saw on MS Blackbird ... (MSN .0001?) 
which, thankfully, was abandonned before leaving the nest.
>>>> Any examples closer to the library world?
What I had been hoping for were data standards more in the library 
space.  I've read ANSI's Z.39.19 which deals with Monolingual thesauri.
  (a copy lives here:  http://www.slis.kent.edu/~mzeng/Z3919/8Z3919toc.htm)
Near as I can tell the parallel multi-lingual standard is ISO 5964 and 
is available at
    
http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_ics/catalogue_detail_ics.htm?ics1=01&ics2=140&ics3=20&csnumber=12159
for a fee of 168 Swiss francs (CHF)  or ~$155USD

I pay attention to the one, and never expect to read the other.

This past week I was on the edge of another discussion of standards with 
associated controlled vocabularies (in the K-12 domain) where a 
criticism was raised that it wasn't Creative Commons with an Attribution 
requirement, else how could you teach it?

That got me thinking about whether we shouldn't have already learned 
that lesson because the 'net largely runs on public RFCs, but wondered 
if I wasn't missing other examples inside our domain.

Walter

---

From: Ross Singer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2009 21:34:57 -0400

Well, it's not a great example, because I don't have a
'counter-example', but I think it will remain to be seen if ISO 20775
goes anywhere if it, too, remains behind a pay wall.  If an open spec
were to come along that allowed the transfer of holdings and
availability information that was decent and simple it would basically
render ISO 20775 irrelevant (if the pay wall doesn't already).

RDA, I think, might also suffer from this problem.

-Ross.

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 10:35 AM, Walter Lewis<[email-masked]> wrote:
>> standards were much cheaper to implement from a technical standpoint. And,
>> from a product standpoint, in the mid-90s, there were still a lot of bets
>> being placed on closed online services like AOL, MSN, and Compuserve.
>
> Not to mention the book I once saw on MS Blackbird ... (MSN .0001?) which,
> thankfully, was abandonned before leaving the nest.
>>>>>
> What I had been hoping for were data standards more in the library space.
>  I've read ANSI's Z.39.19 which deals with Monolingual thesauri.
> Near as I can tell the parallel multi-lingual standard is ISO 5964 and is
> available at
>
> associated controlled vocabularies (in the K-12 domain) where a criticism
> was raised that it wasn't Creative Commons with an Attribution requirement,
> else how could you teach it?
>
> That got me thinking about whether we shouldn't have already learned that
> lesson because the 'net largely runs on public RFCs, but wondered if I
> wasn't missing other examples inside our domain.
>
> Walter
>

---

From: "Ray Denenberg, Library of Congress" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2009 08:57:29 -0400

From: "Ross Singer" <[email-masked]>
> render ISO 20775 irrelevant (if the pay wall doesn't already).

Ross, if you're talking about the ISO 20775 xml schema:
http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso20775/ISOholdings_V1.0.xsd

It's free. 

--Ray

---

From: Gabriel Farrell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:17:26 -0400

> RDA, I think, might also suffer from this problem.

I had assumed that Walter was collecting examples to highlight the
idiocy of the RDA wall.

---

From: Ross Singer <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:07:25 -0400

> http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso20775/ISOholdings_V1.0.xsd

It's also not a spec, it's a schema.  If the expectation is that
people are actually going to adopt a standard from merely looking at
an .xsd, my prediction is that this will go nowhere.

I mean, I'm wrong a lot, but I feel pretty good about this reading
from my crystal ball.

-Ross.

---

From: "Houghton,Andrew" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:26:49 -0400

> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of
> Ross Singer
> Sent: Thursday, July 16, 2009 11:07 AM
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Open, public standards v. pay per view
> standards and usage
> 

Not saying you're wrong Ross, but it depends.  People adopted MARC-XML
by looking at the .xsd without an actual specification.  Granted it's
not a complicated schema however, and there already existed the "MARC 21 
Specifications for Record Structure, Character Sets, and Exchange Media"
so it wasn't a big leap to adopt MARC-XML, IMHO.

Generally I agree with your conclusion Ross. It's difficult for people
to just pick up an .xsd and understand what the semantics are for each
element and attribute in the schema and which element(s) should be used 
for the document element.  This is mitigated by annotations in the .xsd 
for the elements and attributes and also mitigated by using the Russian
doll schema approach, that MARC-XML uses, so it's clear what elements
can be used for the document element.  Also tools like XMLSpy that
provide a graphical representation of the .xsd can provide insights
into how the schema should be used.

But these are a lot of if this and that was done, and you have appropriate 
tools.  A freely available specification detailing each element and 
attribute along with their semantics is much better for understanding a 
schema than the schema itself, but obviously the schema is the definitive 
authority when it comes to generating conforming instance documents.

Andy.

---

From: "Ray Denenberg, Library of Congress" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:31:26 -0400

I am not even remotely suggesting that anyone would implement the holdings 
standard with nothing but the schema.   We're working on a solution to this.

--Ray

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Houghton,Andrew" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Thursday, July 16, 2009 11:26 AM
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Open, public standards v. pay per view standards and 
usage

---

From: Bill Dueber <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:45:16 -0400

> so it wasn't a big leap to adopt MARC-XML, IMHO.

I'm not disagreeing with your overall point, but this is a specious example,
I think. Examining a MARC-XML file shows you how to do a mechanical
translation from a ridiculously simple non-XML syntax into an XML syntax --
the actual data itself remains completely opaque. The MARC-XML schema +
AACR2 gives you what you need.

The ISO 208775 schema, for example, include elements like <xs:element
name="physicalLocation"> -- and there's no way you're going to know what the
hell goes in there without a lot more help. And if you were to have to pay
for that help, many would rely on cheat-sheets or pattern-matching and it
all goes to hell.

-- 
Bill Dueber
Library Systems Programmer
University of Michigan Library

---

From: "Houghton,Andrew" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:15:58 -0400

> Sent: Thursday, July 16, 2009 11:45 AM

Yes it was and I tried to point that out.  I'm sure others might be
able to come up with examples in or out of the library domain where
only having the schema wasn't an issue to adoption.  This is why I
said: "it depends", but in philosophy I agree that it's generally a
barrier to adoption.

> name="physicalLocation"> -- and there's no way you're going to know
> what the hell goes in there without a lot more help. And if you were 
> to have to pay for that help, many would rely on cheat-sheets or 
> pattern-matching and it all goes to hell.

Exactly the point of the rest of my prior post, but more bluntly put :)

So why do people keep running new standards thru organizations like ISO
that lock them up behind a pay system?  It's probably better to run them
through NISO first where they will be freely available, then run them
through ISO where ISO can lock them up for the people who require the ISO
stamp of approval before they can use a standard.

Now a days, all standards should be free.  They are created by people from
participating institutions who put their time and effort into them, not by
the institution where they are housed.  Charging for standards is counter
productive to adoption.  In the past, before the Web, you could get away
with that business model because you didn't have a low cost distribution
model.  Today it doesn't cost much to house a digital copy, heck Google 
Docs and other cloud services will do it for free.  I can see paying for a 
standard if I want a bound printed copy of the standard, otherwise it just
doesn’t make sense [to me].	

Andy.

---

From: Karen Coyle <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:09:23 -0700

> stamp of approval before they can use a standard.

I'm on the NISO Architecture Committee, and one of the things that we're 
discussing is what to do about NISO standards that become ISO standards.

First, things go to ISO to become *international* standards, and my 
experience in Europe (I don't know other areas) is that people care very 
much (much more than us) that a standard be international. So having 
standards go to ISO is very important in the global information exchange 
arena.

Second, standards can undergo change as they move from NISO to ISO. I 
believe with ISO 2709 there was agreement that it be backward compatible 
with Z39.2, but they are not identical. Should NISO revise its standard 
to match the ISO standard? Should it cease maintenance (NISO 
maintenance) on a standard that has gone on to ISO so as to keep them in 
sync? etc.

I agree that a standard that you can't afford to see (and I've run into 
a number in my time) is pretty close to useless. I don't know if there's 
any chance of convincing ISO of that, however.

kc

-- 
-----------------------------------
Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
[email-masked] http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596   skype: kcoylenet
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
------------------------------------

---

From: "Houghton,Andrew" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2009 14:20:38 -0400

> Karen Coyle
> Sent: Thursday, July 16, 2009 2:09 PM
> to match the ISO standard?

This would by my preferred solution.

Andy.