[uf-discuss] Re: one citation microformat use case (Michael McCracken)

[Michael McCracken]

Speaking from my own viewpoint and that of the BibDesk users I've talked to
(generally academics, not librarians - it is a bibtex editor), I think that
a complete resource description framework would be welcome, but probably
overkill. All we really need is enough metadata to import into our local
collections and then reproduce a citation in the MLA/Chicago/insert journal
style here/ format.

I view hCite as one method to automate that process of publishing such
automatically importable data. In BibDesk, we have a feature that lets
people view a web page then select the text and choose mappings to bibtex
fields (ie, select an author name and click on the author field) - people
are doing this markup by hand, and they love that feature! There would be
many happy people if this kind of simple mapping was done by markup already.

You lost me with your discussion of comporting validity - are you referring
to just expressing author/location information for the cited work or
something more elaborate than what is currently done with citations?

I added a bunch of markup examples to the wiki from databases I use. Their
markup seems pretty lame. I wanted to add an example from
http://www.citeulike.org/ but the site was unreachable just now - that site
imports from the other sites, I believe using screen-scraping plugins.

-mike

On 2/13/06, Ryan Cannon <ryan at ryancannon.com> wrote:
>
> I agree that the use of hAtom + citation, or even Atom + citation
> (hCite?) would be a good method to syndicate citation formats. The
> discussion of citations has been kicking up and then dying a number
> of times, and I take some of the blame as one of the people who'd
> like to push the format along not taking enough initiative.
>
> I think the most difficult part of the hCite discussion is framing
> our 80/20. Most bloggers and less formal writers only define
> references to other web sites as a single link, without much in the
> was of data to be marked up by a Microformat, where as academics seem
> to be looking for a locator and authenticity-validator not unlike MLA
> or Chicago, while librarians and others have been talking about
> including even more data in order to form a complete (pardon the
> jargon pun) framework for resource description.
>
> I think the problem that hCite would be trying to solve, however,
> would be the current inability to create a reference (hyper- or not)
> to another work in a way that comports validity information to the
> reader *without viewing the work*. hCite would be an attempt to
> standardize that process and therefore allow both people and tools to
> better understand the information.
>
> --
> Ryan Cannon
>
> Interactive Developer
> MSI Student, School of Information
> University of Michigan
> http://RyanCannon.com/
>
>
> On 11 Feb 2006, at 3:00 PM, microformats-discuss-
> request at microformats.org wrote:
>
> > Message: 2
> > Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2006 19:25:48 -0800
> > From: Michael McCracken <michael.mccracken at gmail.com>
> > Subject: [uf-discuss] one citation microformat use case
> > To: microformats-discuss at microformats.org
> > Message-ID:
> >       <d4fa3cf70602101925s7bf082e4g809156385807e47e at mail.gmail.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
> >
> > Hi, I just found the recent conversations about a citation
> > microformat, and
> > saw that the discussion slowed down around the same time someone
> > asked about
> > what problem we're solving. I'd like to add my two cents:
> >
> > I have a particular use case in mind: I would like to have my
> > publications
> > list on my home page have enough detail to reconstruct at least a
> > BibTeX
> > entry from it, and ideally something richer. I'd also really like
> > to be sure
> > that there's an element that's a link to a hard-copy of the
> > referenced item
> > for download, if available.
> >
> > Given such a microformat, I'd add support to BibDesk to generate it
> > from
> > BibTeX (and our upcoming database format), and support to add items
> > from a
> > web page directly to a database in BibDesk. I would also like to be
> > able to
> > subscribe to a page with data in this format, so I'd know when new
> > publications were added.
> >
> > So, I'd like to hear opinions (since I'm new to the idea of
> > microformats) on
> > how to support subscriptions with the citation format, and whether
> > or not
> > it'd be best done by also using hAtom.
> >
> > I've been wanting to add this kind of support to BibDesk for years,
> > and the
> > number of citation metadata formats has made it difficult to decide
> > on a
> > good path to take.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > -mike
> >
> > --
> > Michael McCracken
> > UCSD CSE PhD Candidate
> > research: http://www.cse.ucsd.edu/~mmccrack/
> > misc: http://michael-mccracken.net/blog/
>
>


--
Michael McCracken
UCSD CSE PhD Candidate
research: http://www.cse.ucsd.edu/~mmccrack/
misc: http://michael-mccracken.net/wp/
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