On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 20:29, Guy Harris <guy@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
On Oct 20, 2011, at 9:41 AM, Todd Glassey wrote:
has largely been managed as an ad-hoc offering and this was accepted everywhere because the party and hosting entity for this were the US Government NIH and Dr. Olson.
Do you have any evidence to show that the fact that Mr. Olson happens to work at the US National Institute of Health, and that the US National Institute of Health lets (or let) him store it on one of their FTP servers (I don't even know whether anybody in a Significant Position of Authority(TM) at the NIH knew about that) made any difference whatsoever?
I agree. I expect that the database was accepted everywhere because it existed and there is no freely available competitor that I know of - so the alternative would be to do all your research yourself (as does Microsoft, for example, as far as I know). And because the contents have been found to be reasonably accurate and updates timely, of course. I doubt that the person of Mr Olson and/or his affiliation with NIH had much to do with acceptance rates. Cheers, Philip -- Philip Newton <philip.newton@gmail.com>