- From: <love26@gorge.net>
- Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 09:09:50 -0400 (EDT)
- To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by William Loughborough love26@gorge.net. rdf interest group I seem to remember a recent incident during which a patent was issued for "cascading style sheets" or some such thinly veiled attempt to proprietarize an effort that clearly has roots (and techniques, etc.) in the work of groups like this one. It's amazing how much this press release sounds like a "bull move" to establish de facto standards for areas called RDF, CC/PP, etc. in the W3C. I wonder if any of those working on the "closely guarded secrets" of this industrial cabal also mine the minds of folks on this list? Just curious. Love. William Loughborough love26@gorge.net /-------------------- advertisement -----------------------\ Celebrate Summer with a NYTimes.com Photo Screensaver NYTimes.com's latest screensaver captures the unforgettable moments from Coney Island amusement park. Enjoy these images every day on your computer, absolutely free. http://www.nytimes.com/partners/screensaver/index.html?eta2 \----------------------------------------------------------/ Plan Aims to Foster Electronic Commerce Between Businesses September 5, 2000 By JOHN MARKOFF SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 4 -- Seeking to promote the rapid development of electronic commerce between businesses, I.B.M., Microsoft and Ariba plan to announce a proposal on Wednesday to create a huge set of online registries of products and services to help automate business transactions. Twenty-nine companies, including American Express, CommerceOne, Compaq, Merrill Lynch and Sun Microsystems, will initially endorse the proposal, to be named the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration project, or UDDI. The backers said they planned to turn the idea over eventually to one of several Internet standards bodies to make it a broadly backed initiative. "We are intent on making the Web an easier way to handle business-to-business transactions," said Marie Weik, I.B.M.'s director of electronic markets infrastructure. The initiative comes at a time when companies have begun to grapple with the intricacies of electronic commerce, hoping to achieve the original promise of a new Internet publishing standard known as Extensible Markup Language, or XML. Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML, led to the current World Wide Web as a vast publishing medium. Many hope XML will permit direct computer-to-computer transactions in the next generation of the Web. Until recently, the UDDI project was a closely held secret among the three companies. While I.B.M. and Microsoft are dominant players in Internet commerce, Ariba is a smaller electronic commerce company, based in Mountain View, Calif. Although the initiative is being portrayed as an effort to create an "open" standard, the UDDI project offers some insight into the bruising behind-the-scenes competition taking place in the world of Internet standards as companies seek proprietary advantage for new technologies. Several executives at competing electronic commerce companies said the UDDI standard initiative parallels but ignores an earlier effort led by Commercenet, a competing Silicon Valley electronic commerce initiative. Known as the eCo Framework Project, that system also focused on creating public electronic registries and automated electronic commerce.. But the Commercenet effort has lost momentum, and Microsoft has moved quickly to take over the effort to set standards for electronic commerce. Making analogies to telephone directory yellow and white pages, executives said their proposed UDDI standard would permit companies to publish descriptive information about their organization and their products in a way that could easily be located by electronic commerce software programs used in business transactions. The group said the proposed standard would go a step beyond being a static "telephone directory" style look-up service. An additional component of the registry was described as a "green pages," which would allow companies to publish information about their business practices. This is intended to make it possible for electronic commerce programs based on the XML standard to locate business partners automatically and buy and sell products and services. "Perhaps a better analogy would be to the signaling system used by the telephone network to automatically set up telephone calls," said James Utzschneider, Microsoft's director of Web services for the company's business applications division. The three companies plan to create a prototype within a month. The New York Times on the Web http://www.nytimes.com /-----------------------------------------------------------------\ Visit NYTimes.com for complete access to the most authoritative news coverage on the Web, updated throughout the day. Become a member today! It's free! http://www.nytimes.com?eta \-----------------------------------------------------------------/ HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact Alyson Racer at alyson@nytimes.com or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help@nytimes.com. Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
Received on Tuesday, 5 September 2000 09:07:23 UTC