William Wueppelmann wrote:
> [snip]
> I'm not entirely sure that TCP/IP and the other IETF RFCs became 
> established because of restrictions placed on OSI. I was under the 
> impression that OSI was also insanely complicated and that the IETF 
> standards were much cheaper to implement from a technical standpoint. 
> And, from a product standpoint, in the mid-90s, there were still a lot 
> of bets being placed on closed online services like AOL, MSN, and 
> Compuserve.
Not to mention the book I once saw on MS Blackbird ... (MSN .0001?) 
which, thankfully, was abandonned before leaving the nest.
>>>> Any examples closer to the library world?
What I had been hoping for were data standards more in the library 
space.  I've read ANSI's Z.39.19 which deals with Monolingual thesauri.
  (a copy lives here:  http://www.slis.kent.edu/~mzeng/Z3919/8Z3919toc.htm)
Near as I can tell the parallel multi-lingual standard is ISO 5964 and 
is available at
    
http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_ics/catalogue_detail_ics.htm?ics1=01&ics2=140&ics3=20&csnumber=12159
for a fee of 168 Swiss francs (CHF)  or ~$155USD

I pay attention to the one, and never expect to read the other.

This past week I was on the edge of another discussion of standards with 
associated controlled vocabularies (in the K-12 domain) where a 
criticism was raised that it wasn't Creative Commons with an Attribution 
requirement, else how could you teach it?

That got me thinking about whether we shouldn't have already learned 
that lesson because the 'net largely runs on public RFCs, but wondered 
if I wasn't missing other examples inside our domain.

Walter