Internet Draft Massimo Torre
Document: draft-massimo-gfibi-00.txt Electronic Engineer
Expires: July 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
<http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt>
The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at
<http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html>.
This draft must be intended as an individual submission.
Table of Contents
1. Abstract
2. Abbreviations
3. The Problem
4. The "old model"
5. The "new model"
6. The Knowledge
7. Summary
8. Disclaimer
9. References
10. 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. 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
etc. = etcetera = other
URL = Uniform Resource Locator
3. 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, last year, when I was writing a paper for a convention on
the e-economy [1], I quoted a report [2] from Bear Stearns & Co. that was
available for free for some months at the web site of the said Company.
Last month, 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.
4. 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...
5. 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
ome hypothesis of writing down the appropriate references. 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 the web sites managers will be
issued.
6. 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 [4-6].
7. 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.
8. Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this draft are solely the author's.
The worldwide company which I work for has not been mentioned.
9. 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,
http://www.bearstearns.com.
[3] Massimo Torre, "e or not e? A 10 points tour into the Internet Era",
December 2000, ongoing publication.
[4] 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 the web site:
www.valdosta.edu/~whuitt/psy702/files.
[5] Part II (ref. [4]): "Ideometry - A New Way of Knowing".
[6] Part III (ref. [4]): "The Problems".
10. Author's address
Massimo Torre
Rome, Italy
Fax: +39 06 233208654
E.Mail: maxtow@altavista.net