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

David,

On 8/22/2011 9:55 PM, David Booth wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-08-22 at 20:27 -0400, Patrick Durusau wrote:
> [ . . . ]
>> 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?
>
> Using the information associated with an identifier is one thing; using
> the identifier itself is another.  I'm sure the CAS numbers have added
> non-trivial value that should not be ignored.  But their business model
> needs to change.  It is ludicrous in this web era to prohibit the use of
> the identifiers themselves.
>
> If there is one principle we have learned from the web, it is enormous
> value and importance of freely usable universal identifiers.  URIs rule!
> http://urisrule.org/
>
> :)
Well, I won't take the bait on URIs, ;-), but will note that re-use of 
identifiers of a sort was addressed quite a few years ago.

See: /*Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co.*/, 499 
U.S. 340 (1991) or follow this link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural

The circumstances with CAS numbers is slightly different because to get 
access to the full set of CAS numbers I suspect you have to sign a 
licensing agreement on re-use, which makes it a matter of *contract* law 
and not copyright.

Perhaps they should increase the limits beyond 10,000 identifiers but 
the only people who want the whole monty as it were are potential 
commercial competitors.

The people who publish the periodical "Brain" for example at $10,000 a 
year. Why should I want the complete set of identifiers to be freely 
available to help them?

Personally I think given the head start that the CAS maintainers have on 
the literature, etc., that different models for use of the identifiers 
might suit their purposes just as well. Universal identifiers change 
over time and my concern is with the least semantic friction and not as 
much with how we get there.

Hope you are having a great day!

Patrick


>

-- 
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)

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