I don't think we should be too concerned with the definitions of "standard" and "open".
As Peter points out, there are essentially no formal standards for computerized chemical information. Most of what we use could be called de-facto or ad-hoc standards: they've gathered enough critical mass of users to be useful, either because they're backed by a successful commercial product (e.g. Symyx MOL/SD format), or because they're very useful and well documented (SMILES, OpenSMILES), or both. And the difference between open/closed development is also unclear. It ranges from completely open, to meritocracies, to closely-held (a few contributors), to completely closed. There's no simple dividing line. I think it's far more important for each project to be open about it's openness. I know, that sounds like some weird meta-definition, but that's what I really want to know when I'm digging around. Who is behind this? How good is it? Who uses it? Can I contribute to it? If I can quickly find the answers to these questions, then I don't really care if it meets a formal definition of a "standard" or "openness". Hmmm ... maybe I need to address these very points on the opensmiles.org web site... Craig ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
