[uf-discuss] Easy book citations

[Tantek Ç elik]

On 7/30/06 9:47 AM, "Fred Stutzman" <fred at metalab.unc.edu> wrote:

> On Sun, 30 Jul 2006, Simon Cozens wrote:
> 
>> Fred Stutzman:
>>> I believe our task could be as simple as microformatting the bib format.
>> 
>> That's a good idea, but could easily get bogged down in months of committee
>> work (http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-formats) so I think it's probably
>> better to have something simple working and build on it when required.
> 
> Well, indeed, but wouldn't defining a new standard just contribute another
> to this list?

Given how much pre-existing work there is it would be insane to define yet
another different standard.


> Bib is widely adopted by consumers, industry and academia - it is used in
> many reference management applications.

<snip>

> In terms of real world use,
> I've got stuff on my desktop and in my browser that can deal with bib, but
> not with DC or Z39.80.

Fred this is very interesting data.  If you could add this specific
documentation (desktop apps, browser extensions etc.) to the
citation-formats page, that would be *very* helpful in deciding which
vocabulary to subset etc.

 http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-formats


> So the question is, what do we define as "something simple working"

Being able to represent the 80/20 of existing citations published on the Web
(per the examples research).  Some have suggested that even that might be
too much and that we should start with 60/40 coverage which I think may be a
reasonable proposal.

> Do we expect people to write new software and translation layers?

A bit, yes.  Hopefully by keeping it *simple* and a 1:1 subset mapping to
parts of an existing citation format the transforms will be relatively easy
to write.

Thanks,

Tantek