Re: Red Herring: The end of the URL as we know it

Sally Khudairi (sk@zotgroup.com)
Thu, 8 Jul 1999 00:19:51 -0400


I just heard about this while at CommerceNet last week.

Do you think these things come into existence because there
are budgets which need to be spent, or that there really is
a baseline need and nobody has the sense/knowledge/expertise
to solve the problem in an elegant manner?

- S

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Bone <jbone@activerse.com>
To: Sally Khudairi <sk@zotgroup.com>
Cc: FoRK <fork@xent.com>
Date: Thursday, July 08, 1999 12:08 AM
Subject: Re: Red Herring: The end of the URL as we know it

>
>And other namespaces...
>
>Anybody know anything about NIGP? It's this monstrous,
standard, gov't
>"product code" namespace. Everything from canned green
beans to school
>buses to diapers. Used in governmental purchasing. A
company I was
>consulting for a while back "owned" the maintenance of this
namespace as
>a sideline --- they had a group of folks in a room that
people would
>call up and say "what's the code for a polyethylene enema
bag?" These
>"coders" would discover that there wasn't a code for this
item, and
>they'd come up with one and log it in the code. Standard
updates to the
>"codebook" would be distributed periodically. It was even
ontologically
>organized, so that related codes were close according to
some sort
>order.
>
>Weird, huh?
>
>Namespaces are big business.
>
>jb
>
>
>