Karen Coyle wrote:
It's a shame. I can see the reasons why the committee took it the way
they did, but the whole exercise has ended up smelling of architecture
astronautics. See this column if you're not familiar with the term,
it's a good read:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html
Speaking as someone who was on the committee, I can tell you that there
was not a consensus on "going astronautic." Although some of us fought a
good (well, at least hard) fight, the astronauts won. And if you think
the text of the final standard is dense, you should have seen version
0.1! Eric Hellman wrote a revised version that was 1) in English 2) made
sense, but that, too, was rejected.
If you want to see my reaction to being presented with the "Bison Fute'"
model [1] on the first day of the OpenURL committee meeting, download
this [2] PPT and play it as a slide show (it is self-animated). (It
helps you get the joke if you know that "Bison Fute'" means "wily
buffalo".)
kc
[1] http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july01/vandesompel/07vandesompel.html
[2] http://kcoyle.net/presentations/cpm3.ppt
LOL! :-)
I bet there are several reasons why OpenURL failed in some way but I
think one reason is that SFX got sold to Ex Libris. Afterwards there was
no interest of Ex Libris to get a simple clean standard and most
libraries ended up in buying a black box with an OpenURL label on it -
instead of developing they own systems based on a common standard. I bet
you can track most bad library standards to commercial vendors. I don't
trust any standard without open specification and a reusable Open Source
reference implementation.
Cheers
Jakob
--
Jakob Voß <jakob.v...@gbv.de>, skype: nichtich
Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) / Common Library Network
Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1, 37073 Göttingen, Germany
+49 (0)551 39-10242, http://www.gbv.de
