On Feb 16, 2010, at 4:41 AM, Egon Willighagen wrote: > [...]
>> 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. > > So, the arugment that was made on the Blue Obelisk Exchange is how > this is any different from MDL molfiles, Daylight SMILES, SMD (I'd > never heard about before)... has anyone ever attempted to contribute > to those standards (formally or informally), and been refused? > >> 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. > > To me, the point of the discussion is to be able to explain which > specficiations/standards are Open, and should be promoted, and which > not. > I have somewhat different take in that I'm most interested in knowing what I can and can not do with a particular tool. Obviously no single phrase is going to completely capture all that might be worth saying in this regard so that we should make clear that any classification is at best a useful first pass in deciding which tool is best for a particular job. It also seems to me that the relative weight for the different aspects discussed can change for different uses. At DTP we mainly use MDL sdf format to make chemical structure data available. It is important for that purpose that we be able to freely implement sdf readers and writers, and it is important that the use of that format doesn't lock potential users of the data into any particular software or any particular vendor, but it is not important that we can't modify the format. I'm not sure anyone here would argue that if the sdf format is declared not open (or not recommended) that it would be overall a good thing for the research community for DTP to take down any sdf format files and refuse to create any more. On the other hand, if we were to work on ways to provide better structural information and that work included modifying an existing format, it would be vitally important that that work could be shared freely. I think that if the goal of defining Open is to equate Open with "always good for free and open exchange of data and tools" and not Open to equate to "never good for the free and open exchange of data and tools" , I don't think we will ever agree on a definition. On the other hand I think it might be possible to get a definition of Open which equates to "usually good for the free and open exchange of data and tools" and not Open to mean "presents problems for the free and open exchange of data and tools, but may be useful in certain circumstances". DanZ /******************************************** * Daniel Zaharevitz * Chief, Information Technology Branch * Developmental Therapeutics Program * National Cancer Institute * [email protected] * ********************************************/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
