Scaffolding the New Web Standards and Standards Policy for the Digital Economy

by Libicki, Martin; Schneider, James; Frelinger, Dave R.; Slomovic, Anna

• ISBN13: 9780833028587
• ISBN10: 0833028588
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-07-11
• Publisher: RAND Corporation

Summary

Although much of the growing digital economy rests on the Internet and World Wide Web, which in turn rest on information technology standards, it is unclear how much longer the current momentum can be sustained absent new standards. To discover whether today's standards processes are adequate, where they are taking the industry, and whether government intervention will be required to address systemic failures in their development, RAND undertook five case studies. So far, it seems, the current standards process remains basically healthy, with various consortia taking up the reins of the process, and the rise of open-source software has also aided vendor-neutral standardization. Nevertheless, the prospects for semantic standards to fulfill XML's promise are uncertain. Can the federal government help? Its policy on software patents clearly merits revisiting.

Table of Contents

Preface	iii
Figures and Tables	ix
Summary	xi
Acknowledgments	xv
Glossary	xvii
Introduction	1	(2)
The Place of Standards	3	(8)
What Makes a Standard Standard?	4	(3)
The Potential Importance of Standards	7	(4)
Lessons From Five Case Studies	11	(4)
Standards Foster Openness	11	(1)
But Standards Have to Solve Problems, Both Technical and Social, to Succeed	12	(1)
The Internet and World Wide Web Have Shifted the Focus of Interoperability	12	(1)
Light Standards Continue to Do Better	13	(1)
But the Encapsulation of the Real World into Standard Semantics Is Likely to Be Difficult	13	(2)
The Emerging Challenge of Common Semantics	15	(6)
Let the Market Decide	15	(1)
Have Different Communities Each Decide	16	(1)
Assume Intelligent Software Will Mediate Among Various Vocabularies	17	(1)
Develop Standard Ontologies into Which Standard Terms Are Mapped	18	(1)
Concentrate on the Key Words	19	(1)
Coda	19	(2)
Standards Development Institutions	21	(8)
The IETF	21	(3)
ISO, ITU, and ECMA	24	(1)
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)	24	(1)
The Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) Forum	25	(1)
Open-Source Software	25	(1)
A Typology	26	(3)
The Place of Standards	29	(8)
The Patent Trap	30	(2)
Standards as a Policy Tool	32	(2)
NIST's Evolving Role	34	(2)
For Further Research	36	(1)
Conclusions	37	(2)
Appendix A The Web as We Know It	39	(16)
Appendix B The Extensible Markup Language	55	(20)
Appendix C Knowledge Organization and Digital Libraries	75	(16)
Appendix D Payments, Property, and Privacy	91	(14)
Appendix E Standards and the Future Value Chain	105	(8)
Appendix F On the Meaning of Standard	113	(2)
Bibliography	115