Should International Philately Develop A Single System For Philatelic Identification???

As a worldwide collector with an interest in specialized listings, I find myself quite regularly shopping from dealers who are based outside of North America. One of the great inconveniences that any collector who has involved themselves in the global philatelic marketplace is the reality that stamp identification systems, to this day, remain based upon "national" systems often first developed in the late nineteenth century.

Some of these systems have evolved to cover the entire world, such as Scott in North America, Stanley Gibbons in the UK, Michel in Germany and Yvert et Tellier in France. These four also produce specialized catalogues that go further into depth for thein home nations and historic colonial realms) while other systems have been developed as specialized systems for one region of the world (Edifil for Spain, Sassone for the Italian area, JSDA for Japan, Yang and Ma for China, Facit for Sweden, etc etc.)

The amount of information and research in these catalogues is immense, and philately as an organized hobby today is highly dependent upon them as the way to create a common standard of stamp identification between dealers and collectors, and among collectors.

In the twenty-first century however, the rise of a global philatelic marketplace and global philatelic community has shown the limitations of these "national" systems of identification. Anyone from North America who visits the Delcampe stamp marketplace website, for example, will find that the vast majority of listings of items are identified with catalogues other than Scott. Similarly, most dealers rely on one primary identficiation system for marketing their stock to potential consumers. Since many collectors often do not have copies of alternaive "national" catalogues at hand when they are shopping, the result is often an avoidance of dealers who do not market their stock "with the same catalogue numbers." And for those who do have access to more than one catalogue system at hand, it can be more than a little inconvenient to stop and look up items in a second, or third or more, catalogue as you are surfing the global philatelic marketplace.

And among collectors, especially on internationl stamp forums such as SCF, very often discussions between collectors regarding specific items have to begin by stating what catalogue the initial poster is referring to in their post for purposes of identification to ensure that everyone involved knows which stamp is the focus. Invariably, at some point in longer conversations, someone will raise the question "What is the catalog number for that item in X, I don't use the Y catalogue."

Of course one solution to this would be to have a ready reference site that cross lists catalogue numbers between the major publishers (and relevant specialized literature). There are quite a few websites that do this for specific nations, maintained by collectors with a passion for the stamps and philatelic history of a specific postal authority. But there is no "one stop" place a collector can quick refer to for all nations, and when you are a worldwide collector that can be frustrating.

A few days ago I had the what I thought was a brilliant idea of utlizing a Wikipedia Wikibook project for a Worldwide Stamp Catalogue as the basis for creating a reference point that would provide relevant cross-referencing of stamp identification among the major catalogue publishers. Unfortunately, this idea has hit the commercial reality of the claims to trademark and copyright that national catalogue system publishers maintain. Some of these publishers are very proactive in what they perceive as the defense of their intellectual property, and are more than willing to seek redress through the legal system to protect what they perceive as their vital commercial interests. Not being in the position to want to have to take on any publishing Goliaths, after consideration I've decided caution is the better part of valor and decided not to include catalogue identificaitons as part of the Wikibook.

There is of course an alternative, the development of a single standard system of stamp identification that would, over time, come to be accepted by the philatelic community worldwide as the basis for stamp identification. In an age of an ever more interconnected global philatelic community and marketplace, the creation of such a single universal system, preferably one that is not considered the intellectual property of any one publisher, would I think greatly enhance the development of philatlely as a global hobby.

Which raises the question I posed as the topic of this thread. Should international philately develop a single system for philatelic identification. Here, I am thinking about two organizations with a vested interest in the promotion of philately on an international scale. First, the Federation International du Philately (FIP), which is most well known for its patronage of international stamp exhibitions such as the upcoming New York 2016 show at the end of May.

Second, and probably even more likely to see this as a worthy idea, the Universal Postal Union's World Association for the Development of Philately (WADP). The WADP has actually taken the first step in this development, creating an international identification system that it uses with new issues released by the various international postal authorities. It's database starts in 2002, and for those nations whose postal administrations are diligent in submitting new material, contains items right up to early 2016 for many nations.

What I find surprising is that the WADP has not considered creating a database that extends backwards from 2002 all the way back to the first stamp released by the United Kingdom in 1840. I am sure that there are many who probably regard the amount of work that would be needed to create and maintain such a database as perhaps a use of resources that could be better utilized for other projects. But as the hobby continues to become increasingly globally interconnected over the next several decades, I do think that international philatelic organizations, and the WADP in particular, might want to consider developing such a system in the future. While it would likely take several years for such a system to become accepted within the marketplace, the benefits to the hobby of such a system being developed could greatly enhance the growth of the hobby, both in terms of the hobby itself, and the retail industry behind the hobby.

Just my random thoughts after spending a weekend realizing that there are some windmills that even Don Quixote should have appreciated would have been difficult challenges to overcome.

You've created an interesting thesis and one that deserves some thought. There is more to it than just various "national systems." One of my pet peeves in the US is with dealers and sellers who insist on pricing British area auction items; and stamps in the APS Stamp Store; using Gibbons rather than Scott. Maybe a some sort of database, as you suggest, would deal with this.

I have never visited DelCampe and tend to avoid foreign dealers in general. A problem with ebay, for me and a major reason for why I don't shop on ebay, is how Portuguese material is handled. The dealers whose sites I've visited for colonial material either have excessive pricing, poor condition, or both, on items for sale. And I love it when I see Fournier forgeries of the 1877 colonial crown issues being passed off as genuine. APS immediately removes such items; dealers could care less.

One thing that you didn't mention is that some of us who collect foreign speciality material actually are adept in using other catalogs. I collect British East Africa; have the Gibbons catalog for that area; and have become adept in using it. Even more adept in use of Afinsa for Portuguese stuff.

Regardless, I applaud you for bringing up a very complex & interesting topic. Be interesting to see what others have to say. Steve

Same here Steve, I have developed quite a little library of specialized catalogues for various nations that I refer to on a constant basis. It is just one of those "inconveniences" (not really inconvenient but another step to do when plunging into the philatelic marketplace looking for material) that I guess are part of the nature of specializing in a collecting area that is not your own country's stamps.

Re Delcampe, you should check it out, there is a LOT of Portuguese colonial material available for purchase, much of it listed based on the Afinsa catalogue system, and with the US$ continuing to be fairly strong against the Euro, some great deals can be found. I use Delcampe quite regularly, and have never had any problems receiving items that I purchase. Just be sure to use the global delcampe.net internet site so that you get listings from all dealers around the world.

It would not be an insurmountable challenge, but some numbering systems include stamps--or perhaps more properly, varieties--that others do not. It`s difficult to get folks to agree to most anything, you know. We still argue about when to celebrate Easter.

Good to see that the odd neuron is still firing, DJCMHOH ;)

A whole new system seems ambitious, and it still leaves the problem of easy access to all that accumulated information in all those specialty catalogs, as well as whether/not the whole new system would achieve more than minority acceptance.

What might be more feasible is to get the identification system owners to agree on a common translator.

At the common translator, to keep it simple, you would enter Scott X and get back Michel Y, Yvert Z, etc.

One design issue is whether you get back only the one publisher you ask for, or get back all possible publishers, or ...

As to the stamp itself, the results would need to clue the user when there is a one-to-many or many-to-one relationship, eg:

- when the user has entered a catalog number from a system that does not recognize minor varieties, and gets multiple catalog numbers from one that does (one-to-many);

- when the user has entered a catalog number from a system that recognizes minor varieties, and gets a catalog number from one that does not (many-to-one).

I hesitate how to imagine dealing with any outright conflicts.

Of course, one would hope that the publishers would agree to enabling easy follow-on results, eg, click on any catalog number to get that description & details.

Mindful of Don's disapproval, I would still recommend financing the common translator with a micro payment system.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

This would suffice for me, but publishers probably wouldn't be on board with this, even if you were giving the info away and not making money at it. Amos publishing, for example, wants you to buy the Scott Catalogue in order to get the Scott numbers. If someone has Michel and can just input the Michel number to get the Scott number, they wouldn't need to buy Scott, now would they? Same goes for any of the catalog publishers. Some may be a little more flexible than others, but at the end of the day, if people don't buy their products, they go out of business.

Even this, of course, would probably only work for the major numbers. Michel lists thousands of stamps and varieties just for the German area that Scott doesn't, meaning there's no direct translation of a catalog number in those cases. The catalogs don't even all agree on what a major number is in every case.

Which brings us to how difficult it would be to create a new, universal system from scratch. What gets a major listing and what doesn't? Who decides? Who owns the numbering system? Unless it's done with donated labor and in the public domain from the get-go, we'd be right back in the same boat, with the creators of the new system putting walls up around it to protect their work.

There would also be a learning curve for collectors and dealers. For all their quirks and inadequacies, the current numbering systems are kind of like the QWERTY keyboard. There are better ways of doing it, but the one that exists works well enough for most people and learning something new is too much of a bother.

To succeed it would need to be a long term project on the scale of a generation or so. The biggest challenge would probably be in keeping collectors and contributors interested long enough to build something useful that starts to actually gain traction in the marketplace. That would probably take years, and people could start losing interest before that happens.

Ah, yes, but who is the person who is using the Universal Translator?

For example, a bidder/buyer sees a listing for a stamp with a Michel number, and would purchase that stamp to place in his album that already uses Scott numbers. Honor has been satisfied.

Or, from the other side, a seller who knows the Michel number would like to sell the stamp to buyers who only know from Scott. Demanding that the seller buy Scott catalogs raises a barrier that major sellers have already met, and that minor sellers will be unlikely to meet, while the buyer waits with an empty space in his Scott-published album.

It is a bit of cup-half-empty vs cup-half-full, but I would pitch it to Scott et al that they are helping the owners of their products make use of their products, thereby enhancing the value of their products, but that's me.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

My dear brother in stamps, DJCMHOH, you've finally began to realize the battle I've been following and thinking for the past 15 years or so. I know you've got to make the 'mistakes' yourself in order to learn, but hear out a few words of the wise: building out yet another 'old fashioned' identifier scheme from the scratch would not provide any additional value. On most likely scenario you'd just create a bit more chaos in a world that is already so twisted.

-k-

ikey - I think you have hit the nail squarely on the head. Your first post has got my neurons firing into overdrive now.

Rather than rebuilding Rome from scratch, using the technology of the twenty-first century with the architecture that already exists is the better solution.

if only I had done computer science as a major at university, rather than history, the solution to the problem would likely have been much easier to see.

Several years ago I promoted the concept of developing a open source specification for assigning numbers to all philatelic resources, stamps, images, documents etc. The idea was that by having an open document which allowed for anyone to understand and use a universal numbering system the sharing of information would become much easier.

The effort was called PIN (Philatelic Information Network). It was based upon metadata. I got little support and a fair amount of push back.

So I went ahead and wrote a preliminary specification and published it for feedback. Still little support and in fact it seemed to upset some notable personalities. Some folks appeared to not understand metadata and I may have not been presenting it in a way that was non-technical.

I moved ahead, got a .org domain name, set up a SQL database, and built a web site which demonstrated the idea. I also implemented the preliminary numbering system. Users could add stamps, stamp images, stamp documents and even links.

Bill Weiss helped by prompting the idea to some of the predominate people in our hobby but even this generated little support.

Having a system like this would mean that philatelic data across the world would be able to connected, reused, and accessed. Think of it as a digital 'Dewey decimal system' for all things philatelic.

After few months with little support, I was faced with deciding if I wanted to keep footing monthly bills for the site. I saw little value in doing this so I shut it down and moved on (to start Stamp Smarter).

So my opinion is to generate support for this kind of idea. But if others wanted to pursue it, I would be interested in helping. I still have the written specification and all the source code if anyone would like to see if it might form a starting point for this kind of effort.
Don

DJCMHOH - you are quite correct. Work with what is there - do not go out an try to invent a new wheel. The issue here is not philately, it is Information Management, and information technology is the device that can make this work. As an expert in that area I suggest there are very likely simple solutions to this issue. The hard decision though is that a line needs to be drawn in the sand: that there shall be no more i.d. systems than "x." At that point, you need to build a bridge. You could for instance, assign a prefix to each catalogue so that Michel - for example - becomes AA. Stamp 345 is now AA345 in a relational database, linking it directly to BBGibbons 326. Such a system would most likely require i.d. sub-sets or footnoting due to variations recorded in one catalogue but not in others. Yes - this would be a large job - but creating a universal i.d. system would be much larger, and likely impossible.

I am not sure that the catalog vendors could object, on copyright grounds, to a database that simply "translated" one system to another. If that database returned information of the kind that catalogs contain, that's where the issue over intellectual property rises. It has been awhile since I looked at all the hullabaloo over Scott claiming a trademark or copyright over their numbering system, but my recollection was that they couldn't copyright the numbering system itself. It all reminds me of a lawsuit underway right now over whether the "Klingon language" can be copyrighted, with strong arguments that it cannot. If I were of a mind simply to create a database translated various catalog numbers back and forth between vendors, I wouldn't let Scott or anyone else scare me off. Scott has already opened the door for this by allowing sellers to use their numbers to describe what they are selling. Why would they want to stop buyers from doing the same?

Basil

Some catalog numbering systems are very illogical in that there is no way to figure out their numbering system without and/or outside of their catalogue. Others follow a logical system such as based on the same stamp die used for sheet, booklet and coil stamps. Thus, the most popular catalogue is not always the most logical catalogue. I like the logical layout of the former U.S. 1847 stamp website catalogue very much which is now on the Stamp Smarter website.

Scott has always fought to protect its numbering system, resorting to the courts when necessary. To my knowledge, every lawsuit they have initiated has been settled and the issue has never gone to judicial adjudication. Ther last case in my memory was against Krause Publications (Minkus). I don't know about other catalog publishers.

No system is going to work for everybody . If dealers are using a establish system that their customers know, what is the incentive to change ? ---It is easier to buy copyright and publishing rights for the Scott Catalog from Amos Press and then purchase the Michel Catalog firm from its owners .
Sort of like buying the horse buggy building business from Henry Ford because he wants to go into a different business .

The numbering systems of organizations such as Scott are useful, and I now use Scott and Michel regularly and have old SG and the Canadian one. But, I have started organizing some of my material pragmatically, which is first by country, then year-month-day issued (with a string identifier for the stamp/set). "Sets" built over years can be tied by the string ID - with whatever data type you like (a sequence number or appended numeral). This takes care of the Major items in the catalog. Varieties are then naturally extensions of the Major items.

The difficultly in trying to align different publishers catalogues and even individual collectors personal "catalogs" are the varieties, which frankly are somewhat a matter of opinion and collector interest. Its hardly worth the effort IMO. Develop a system based on pragmatics and leave the varieties to everyone with an opinion.

However, I see specialized publications and some country catalogues that regularly reference Michel apparently without a problem. Perhaps we should dump Scott and adopt Michel as the worlds catalog. The nice thing about Michel is the items are already arranged in more-or-less my definition of pragmatic order.