Dear Pat, (01)
> The first. Only the ISO has this absurd policy of
> charging cash for standards; (02)
MW: There are others. (03)
MW: But lets be precise about this. The problem has its
roots in ISO essentially seeing itself as a publishing house.
That at least is how it gets its income. The up side is that it
does not charge to participate in standards development. Try the
OMG charges if you want to see how much that can be, even if
their specs are free to users (or W3C for that matter). (04)
MW: Now I think that ISO is outdated in thinking like this, and
many of us are trying to persuade them to change, but that is
still the current situation. (05)
MW: Now, in ISO TC184/SC4 we have managed to get dispensation
to make all the computer interpretable stuff, i.e. what you need
to implement the standard. So suppose someone makes their
OWL ontology available free, but then publishes a book through
a publisher (who naturally charges for it) explaining its use.
How would you see that? How would that be different from what
ISO TC 184/SC4 does. (06)
> moreover, I would
> not say that Matthew's interpretation of 'open'
> is universally accepted. The W3C is not open in
> this sense, for example. (07)
MW: Indeed I would certainly NOT see W3C as open. This concerned
some enough that they moved to OASIS. (08)
>
> >Is the OOR supposed restricted to ontologies that are developed in an
> >open process and come with very light weight copyright
> licenses (e.g. *
> >*Creative Commons Attribution )?
>
> Certainly the latter. Lets take a stand on this.
> It does not eliminate ISO participation, but it
> does require them to make any relevant standards
> freely available. They can do this, and have done
> it in the past. (09)
MW: Indeed, see above. (010)
> Putting something into the OOR
> should make it automatically available for access
> and use without restriction; like the GNU
> licences, it should not permit other copyright
> restrictions to be 'passed through' its open
> policy.
>
> >Or is OOR open for all ontologies that are developed in an
> open process
> >regardless of their copyright license?
> >Would the OOR be open for ontologies that are developed and
> maintained
> >by a group of people who don't want to participate in an open process
> >but are willing to publish their ontology as a freely
> available resource
> >for the community?
>
> I have no problem with that part. We should
> permit ontologies that were constructed by one
> person in total privacy, or written on stone
> tablets by God, as long as they are freely
> available for public use without restriction.
> This is what 'open' means in 'open cyc', for
> example. (011)
MW: I think the lack of an open process is a problem,
but I'm actually prepared to be more permissive.
For most of these issues above, I think the most
important thing is to be clear about what the
situation is. So there is a clear statement as to
whether:
- There is an open process for development
- How much do you have to pay to participate in that process?
- What is free, and what is not, and how much that is (012)
MW: I do not suffer from the illusion that there are
no costs in developing an ontology. The only real
question is what is the business model?
- pay to join the development organization
- donate own time and resources to contribute
- sell services based on deliverables
- pay for deliverables
- ... (013)
MW: In fact what I dislike most are the organizations
that charge for membership to participate in development. (014)
Regards (015)
Matthew West
Reference Data Architecture and Standards Manager
Shell International Petroleum Company Limited
Registered in England and Wales
Registered number: 621148
Registered office: Shell Centre, London SE1 7NA, United Kingdom (016)
Tel: +44 20 7934 4490 Mobile: +44 7796 336538
Email: matthew.west@xxxxxxxxx
http://www.shell.com
http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/ (017)
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