INTERNET-DRAFT Massimo Torre Document: draft-massimo-gfibi-01.txt Electronic Engineer Expires: November 2001 Economics & Management Ph.D. Guidelines for Internet Bibliographic Issues Status of this Memo: This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet- Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at . The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at . This draft must be intended as an individual submission. Table of Contents 1. Abstract 2. Revision History 3. Abbreviations 4. The Problem 5. The "old model" 6. The "new model" 7. The Knowledge 8. Summary 9. Disclaimer 10. References 11. Author's address 1. Abstract This draft is intended to focus on the important issue of how to set a sort of rules when authors publishing any kind of material (papers, articles, books, reports, etc, either in hard copy or in electronic one) face the problem of making references to any other kind of material in the electronic form (i.e., mainly, World Wide Web documents). 2. Revision History The present revision of this draft has been updated thanks to some comments sent to me by various people. The contents have not been updated, but some useful references have been added and some syntax irregularities in quoting URLs have been removed. 3. Abbreviations The terminology used in this draft is very simple. No technical terms are used a part that of "URL". The only abbreviations to be mentioned are: i.e. = id est = that is e.g. = exempli gratia = for example etc. = et cetera = other URL = Uniform Resource Locator 4. The Problem Until now, let's say, "The Internet Era", all kinds of documents quoted in articles, books, etc. could be easily found in archives or, at least, traced back to their original source (see the next paragraph). Now, whith the ever increasing use of the web as a big source of information some problems arise when an author come to quote a reference that has been spread out with help of the Internet technology, i.e. mailing lists, ftp programs, web pages. The last case is currently the most common, as many articles and reports are available in the "on-line" version of many important magazines or Company sites. For example, two years ago, when I was writing a paper for a convention on the e-economy [1], I quoted a report [2] from Bear Stearns & Co. that had been available for free for some months at the web site of the said Company. Later, when I was writing an article about the Internet Era [3], I found useful to quote the same report, but when I checked the existence of the report in the web site of Bear Stearns & Co., it was disappeared. I mean, when I was keying in my Netscape browser the URL of the page, the following typical message appeared on the screen of my PC: "Server Error This server has encountered an internal error which prevents it from fulfilling your request. The most likely cause is a misconfiguration. Please ask the administrator to look for messages in the server's error log." Thus, how to quote a "non-existent" document? Maybe, it had been archived in some directories, but where? Really I tried a search with the help of the search engine of that site, but I was unsuccesfull. Therefore, the only thing I could do was quoting the document in one of the three following ways: 1) the same as [2] but without the URL of the report; 2) the same as [2] but replacing the URL of the report with the general URL of Company site; 3) the same as [2] but adding the date in which I found the document. This last option is maybe the most correct, but is nevertheless useless. At the same time the second option is not complete, but could be more useful. Other options can be discovered, but some "standards" must be issued. 5. The "old model" What does the "old model" mean? It simply is the bibliographic model for quoting hard copy documents. I present it here only for having a comparison with the "new model" of the next paragraph. When it comes to quote a book, for example, this is the way it must be done: 1) Author(s) 2) Title (in italic) 3) Series (if any) 4) Publisher 5) Number of the edition (if more than one) 6) Place(s) of the Publisher 7) Year of the edition Of course, many other models are available, for example the case of an article published in a magazine: in this case, the italic format is reserved for the name of the magazine, and the title of the article must appear between brackets. But this is an old stuff... 6. The "new model" Until a "standard" is developed I can only indicate the following simple model of "Guidelines for Internet Bibliographic Issues". The model is not so different from the old one for the parts regarding authors, titles, etc. The differences are in all that part regarding the URL or other forms of "electronic data". As regards this matter I have already provided in "The Problem" paragraph one hypothesis of writing down the appropriate references. The only thing wothwhile to be added is that authors quoting URLs (in one of the three forms described), should follow as much as possible the rules described in [4]. At the present moment I think that any other suggestions are welcome, but is not the focus of this draft. As I said in the introduction, the main focus of this draft, is to raise the issue, not to solve the problem. The problem itself will find a real solution only when some "guidelines" for web sites managers will be issued. Actually some guidelines are already issued (e.g. [5]), but they must be followed too! 7. The Knowledge Some other word only to stress the importance of all this matter. As the "Internet Era" is growing day by day, and the information available on the Internet is following the Moore's Law or even more, the very essence of the real knowledge risks to be lost, and the role of a right process of storing and retrieving data is central! For having a deeper idea of what are the outstanding possibilities of the real knowledge that can raise from the "Internet Era", I suggest the paper "The Internet & the Future of Organized Knowledge" presented by Prof. Luciano Floridi at the Unesco Conference in Paris, March 14-17, 1995 [6-8]. 8. Summary In this draft I presented the problem of how quoting elctronic references. I presented the problem itself, a short-term solution (i.e. some guidelines and the desire of further suggestions about them), and a long-term solution (i.e. guidelines for web sites managers). At the end I have suggested an outstanding reading on the enormous possibilities of getting a new form of knowledge through the Internet. Again, the main aim of this draft is to raise the problem above indicated and maybe to suggest an important issue on which some new working group could be involved. 9. Disclaimer The opinions expressed in this draft are solely the author's. The worldwide company which I work for has not been mentioned. 10. References [1] Massimo Torre, "3e: Electronic Economy Evolution. Some basic principles of the new economy", paper presented at the Convention "Italian E-economy Development, S.Anna School for Universities and Advanced Studies, Pisa, May 27th 2000. [2] Nicholas Bell, Philip Golmith, "European Media. Web positioning", in Bear Stearns & Co., "e-volve. Dot-com and beyond", report, USA, 2000, . [3] Massimo Torre, "e or not e? A 10 points tour into the Internet Era", December 2000, internal report. [4] T. Berners Lee, R. Fielding, U.C. Irvine, L. Masinter, "Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax", RFC 2396, August 1998. [5] T. Berners Lee, "Cool URIs don't change", World Wide Web Consortium document, 1998. Available at: . [6] Luciano Floridi, "The Internet & the Future of Organized Knowledge. Part I: Understanding the Internet", paper presented at the UNESCO Conference in Paris, March 14th-17th 1995. Available at: . [7] Part II (ref. [6]): "Ideometry - A New Way of Knowing". [8] Part III (ref. [6]): "The Problems". 11. Author's address Massimo Torre Rome, Italy Fax: +39 06 233208654 E.Mail: maxtow@altavista.net