I don't think this is going to be trivial to accomplish and it has several
aspects of the Open Data discussion which has taken many people a lonng time
to converge at a potential solution - which defines motivation rather than
formal licence. IMO some questions are:
* is the spec freely available?
* is the specification offered to the community in a cooperative manner?
* if people wish to be involved in the specification are there formal or
informal mechanisms to contribute and are those contributions recognised?
* is there a reference implementation of the spec with examples and
software?
I do not see a requirement that anyone can take the specification and
redistribute modified versions as useful. That is what has led to some of
the proliferation of incompatibilities that we already have
A typical example of an open specification (IMO) is CIF. It has a governance
procedure and is freely accessible and anyone sufficiently enthusiastic
could contribute (though not necessarily formal).
CML is offered to the community as an IMPLEMENTED VERIFIABLE VALIDATABLE
specification. Anyone who wishes to help with the critical work of creating
reference examples, validation code, unit tests etc. would be highly
welcomed. It's hard and boring and you don't get many publications. It
necessarily has to be COORDINATED. But if anyone wishes to participate we'd
be delighted.
Personally I think that is "Open". It's as precise as the "Open" in "Open
Data" which is NOT a formal licence but an intent.
On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 7:39 AM, Egon Willighagen <
[email protected]> wrote:
> INVITATION
>
> Hi all,
>
> the discussion on Open Standards and Open Specifications is not over
> yet; Andrew and I are still trying to work out clear guide lines of
> what makes something a Standard or an Open Standard. There is wild
> confusion about (and the Blue Obelisk wiki language seems a bit
> unclear at least):
>
> CML, Daylight SMILES, MDL/Symyx molfiles, InChI, ...
>
> All are published in a (the same) closed access journal, de facto
> freely implementable, ... so, what are the rules here?
>
> I have proposed the use of Open Specification, which is stronger than
> Open Standard in requirements towards Open, but does not enforce it to
> be a standard (that said, how would we calculate uptake anyway?) ...
> but it does require the freedom (rights) to modify and redistribute...
> I believe this is a much more precise, and more workable definition
> ... it is much more in line with Open Source, and Open Data too, and
> makes it therefore a much better approach.
>
> However, this is just me, and worse, the discussion has been mostly
> between me and Andrew. Shall I single handedly change the OS is ODOSOS
> to Open Specification, and update the wiki to the appropriate rules? I
> hope, instead, that others can join in, and help iron out the
> unclarities, and perhaps come to an Open Specification of what ODOSOS
> really is? Andrew has a lot of interesting points, and I do not have
> answers to them all, particularly not without using the 'Open
> Specification' definition...
>
> I wouldn't change the mantra
> Please visit these two pages for the full discussion:
>
>
> http://blueobelisk.stackexchange.com/questions/231/what-formats-fall-into-open-specification
>
> http://blueobelisk.stackexchange.com/questions/106/which-formats-fall-into-open-data-open-source-and-open-standards
>
> Grtz,
>
> Egon
>
> --
> Post-doc @ Uppsala University
> Proteochemometrics / Bioclipse Group of Prof. Jarl Wikberg
> Homepage: http://egonw.github.com/
> Blog: http://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/
> PubList: http://www.citeulike.org/user/egonw/tag/papers
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> SOLARIS 10 is the OS for Data Centers - provides features such as DTrace,
> Predictive Self Healing and Award Winning ZFS. Get Solaris 10 NOW
> http://p.sf.net/sfu/solaris-dev2dev
> _______________________________________________
> Blueobelisk-discuss mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/blueobelisk-discuss
>
--
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SOLARIS 10 is the OS for Data Centers - provides features such as DTrace,
Predictive Self Healing and Award Winning ZFS. Get Solaris 10 NOW
http://p.sf.net/sfu/solaris-dev2dev
_______________________________________________
Blueobelisk-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/blueobelisk-discuss
