Re: CAS, DUNS and LOD (was Re: Cost/Benefit Anyone? Re: Vote for my Semantic Web presentation at SXSW)

David,

On 8/22/2011 7:39 PM, David Wood wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> On Aug 19, 2011, at 06:37, Patrick Durusau wrote:
>> Case in point, CAS, http://www.cas.org/. Coming up on 62 million 
>> organic and inorganic substances given unique identifiers. What is 
>> the incentive for any of their users/customers to switch to Linked Data?
>
> Well, for one thing, CAS (like DUNS) identifiers are proprietary. 
>  They can't be reused for the purposes of identification in 
> non-licensed systems.  That causes no end of trouble for researchers, 
> government agencies and corporations who have bought into those 
> proprietary identification schemes only to find out that they can't 
> reuse the identifiers in new contexts.
>
Not quite correct. You can use up to 10,000 of the CAS identifiers 
before licensing restrictions kick in.

I think the EPA creating their own identifiers is the result of bad advice.

For the following reasons:

1) It simply dirties up the pond of identifiers for organic and 
inorganic substances with yet another identifier.

2) Users and other implementers will bear the added cost of supporting 
yet another set of identifiers.

3) The literature in the area will have yet another set of identifiers 
to either be discovered or mapped.

4) The expertise behind CAS numbers is well known and has a history of 
high quality work.

The use of CAS identifiers supports searching across vast domains of 
*existing* literature. Not all, but most of it for the last 60 or so years.

That is non-trivial and should not be lightly discarded.

BTW, your objection is that "non-licensed systems" cannot use CAS 
identifiers? Are these commercial systems that are charging their 
customers? Why would you think such systems should be able to take 
information created by others?

Hope you are having a great day!

Patrick



> An example is the US Environmental Protection Agency, who uses CAS 
> numbers.  They cannot reuse those identifiers when they publish open 
> government data.  They are not thrilled about that.  The EPA is now 
> publishing their own identifiers.  How long will CAS last as a 
> "standard"?  How many ids has the Encyclopedia of Life developed?  Or 
> Wikipedia?
>
> DUNS numbers, another widely used proprietary identification scheme, 
> are very similar.  Orgpedia [1] and similar approaches are and have 
> been started just to break the deadlock of that scheme.
>
> Face it:  People just hate being boxed in.  Sure, you can make a 
> business model out of doing so, but don't expect anyone to love you 
> for it.  The Web allows people to think about not boxing themselves 
> in.  That is a direct threat to those older and less friendly business 
> models, DUNS and CAS included.
>
> Regards,
> Dave
>
> [1] http://dotank.nyls.edu/ORGPedia.html
>
>

-- 
Patrick Durusau
patrick@durusau.net
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)

Another Word For It (blog): http://tm.durusau.net
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