Joel Bender wrote: (01)
> If they consider the concept of a metre to be the intellectual property
> of the ITU-T (02)
The definition of the metre is a matter of international treaty (the
Convention du Mètre (1875) and its subsequent revisions), and the
maintenance of the International System of Units was assigned to the
BIPM (www.bipm.org) in 1972. While the ISO publications (ISO 31 and ISO
1000) still cost money, the complete current technical specification
(the SI Brochure) is available in PDF for free from the BIPM website. (03)
ITU-T, the Technical Committee of the International Telecommunications
Union (the telephone and telegraph standards organization), another
treaty organization, standardized a URI-like scheme for international
identifiers of arbitrary objects back in 1980, based on sequences of
assigned integer values identifying directories and sub-directories.
Its use was required in wide-area networks of the 1980s and 1990s, and
they created a URN version of it in the late 1990s -- IETF RFC 3061.
And since the OID top-directory 1 is ISO, they figured ISO could and
should use urn:oid: to do their thing, even it made 'metre' =
urn:oid:1.0.31.0.8.4.2.3.26. In their text form, this reads:
{iso(1) standard(0) 31 part(0) version(8) element(4) definition(2)
clause(3) metre(26)}
But since all their software sends on the wire is the integers, which
are all that is required to be unique, clearly the URI need not contain
any of the terms. The ISO Central Secretariat preferred something that
humans could read and translate to an ISO URL. (04)
> and they are using "urn:" URIs because they *don't* want a
> web accessible, unencumbered definition, then I would warn them that
> where there is a need, somebody will fill it, and they will have simply
> cut themselves out of the semantic web. (05)
Please don't jump to such conclusions. The same can be said of Springer
Verlag and Wiley and other publishers, who undoubtedly produce the
journals in which you hope to publish as a means of enhancing your
academic career. Will you and your tenure committee happily see them
die as well? (06)
The ISO was created some 50 years ago and is funded by a system of
National Body contributions and revenue from what were originally paper
standards publications for which ISO was the publisher and needed to
recoup the _proportional_ publication costs and a relatively fixed
administrative cost. Like any publishing house, they protect their
copyrights, and their revenue stream. (07)
The problem they now face is that the paper standards cost has not quite
gone away, because some of the standards are only gradually acquiring
electonic forms, and they now have an additional "relatively fixed"
administrative cost in managing the website. That is, they are now
maintaining two publication systems, with a higher proportion of
overhead to revenue on the paper side. The website provides:
- the repository for, and open access to, the "publicly available
standards" (those that are free downloads)
- the catalog sales point for the ISO publications
- administrative supporting services for the standards development bodies (08)
To change the funding model, the member bodies would have to re-charter
the organization. Other software standards bodies, e.g., W3C, OMG,
OASIS, have different mechanisms that enable them to publish their
standards on the Web, and they see that as a requirement for adoption in
their discipline. But IT software is a small fraction of the ISO
domain. Automotive engineering and refrigeration engineering and
materials management and healthcare and construction and public safety
standards organizations, not to mention the IEEE, all have different
funding and publication models, and many of them are currently suffering
from similar arrangements. (09)
The Web is an enabler for users, but it is an economic disruptor for
these organizations. And ISO itself is an international organization of
standards organizations. Walk a mile in their shoes before you judge them. (010)
For the record, all of the ISO publications that are freely available
are IT standards:
http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards (011)
The reason why ISO wanted a URN is twofold:
- some of the standards are not yet available in electronic form, and
all the others are available in both paper and electronic form. The
idea was to have a uniform means of referring to the standards (and
their parts) without regard to whether there was a web resource.
- ISO has co-publishing arrangements with other bodies, usually the
originating organizations. So there may be several Web URLs from which
you could acquire the standard, but there should be only one URI that is
its official identifier, so that references can be tested for equal.
The idea was that the URN can be recognized as the reference URI at a
glance, while any other URI is probably a resource locator. (012)
We don't need to repeat the urn: v. http: debate, because W3C and IETF
have been having it for a few years, and Pat Hayes and I are on opposite
sides. A large part of standards-making is politics and religion. ;-) (013)
> I would be just as happy with a "http://unitsml.nist.gov/"; prefix, or a
> "http://www.bipm.org/vim/"; one. (014)
I wouldn't know about either. Bob Dragoset (dragoset at nist.gov) --
the human form of unitsml.nist.gov -- would probably know what there is
to know. (015)
-Ed (016)
P.S. Yes, this stuff is my job. (017)
--
Edward J. Barkmeyer Email: edbark@xxxxxxxx
National Institute of Standards & Technology
Manufacturing Systems Integration Division
100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8263 Tel: +1 301-975-3528
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8263 FAX: +1 301-975-4694 (018)
"The opinions expressed above do not reflect consensus of NIST,
and have not been reviewed by any Government authority." (019)
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