Hi all, in reply to a recent private, off-line discussion on what the Blue Obelisk means with 'Open Standard', and what the Open Standards in chemistry are, I like to ask for clarification.
Right now, the wiki [0] says as requirements: * redistributable * well and openly specified These aim at ensuring that a specification can be fully and independently implemented. It also says the being able to modify the specification does not have to be allowed. And this is where it is quite different from the Open Source and Open Data ideas. There is something to be said about this, as standards must not change rapidly, to allow people using the standard to keep up. But, the way the wiki now reads seem to approve that the standard may be developed in a closed community. Is that something the Blue Obelisk should approve, or should we promote the standard development to be Open for the community too? The OpenSMILES project certainly is qualifies as that. The wiki page [0], however, lists a number of standards, some of which are definitely developed in a Closed Community, as the wiki indicates itself too. This includes Java and InChI. CML is listed as Closed Development standard too. >From my recent discussion, I have to say the singling out of Standards is rather confusing, and unlike the general ideas the Blue Obelisk promotes. Therefore, I like to propose we: 1. make clear what Open Standards are Closed and Open Development 2. we include modifiability in the Open Standards definition I am quite confident that versioning and naming of standards can easily overcome incompatibilities, and observe incompatibilities between other standards and versions too. Egon 0.http://blueobelisk.sourceforge.net/wiki/Open_Standards -- Post-doc @ Uppsala University Homepage: http://egonw.github.com/ Blog: http://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/ PubList: http://www.citeulike.org/user/egonw/tag/papers ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Return on Information: Google Enterprise Search pays you back Get the facts. http://p.sf.net/sfu/google-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Blueobelisk-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/blueobelisk-discuss
