[uf-discuss] Citation format straw proposal on the wiki

[Bruce D'Arcus]

On 3/29/06, Ross Singer <ross.singer at library.gatech.edu> wrote:

> But the real point of my reply is not about perceived biases, it's about the
> misconception that OpenURL is key value pairs.  That is one representation
> of OpenURL, but the community profile for journals also has an XML
> incarnation:
> http://alcme.oclc.org/openurl/servlet/OAIHandler/extension?verb=GetMetadata&metadataPrefix=xsd&identifier=info:ofi/fmt:xml:xsd:journal

But the XML representation is basically the same notion: key/values in XML.

Consider these elements:

atitle
title
stitle
jtitle

We have three that are speciic to journals. One should be able to just
have title and short-title and use those in ANY resource.

> What, exactly, is lacking (and I'm not saying it's not lacking, but I have
> to know what is lacking to work through this problem)?

It's just that when one adopts that flat approach, then in order to
encode different resources, one has to add new properties, which tools
then have to updated to understand. So if I need to encode a
conference paper, then that suggests we need to add:

ptitle
ctitle

... and so forth.

The coding of authors has similar issues (in addition, it uses very
Western -- even U.S. -- specific name structures).

Isn't it just easier and more robust to exploit the fact that you can
use more than one class, or containment?

> The point here is
> that /libraries support this/ and the stuff you're citing /will more than
> likely be gotten via a library in some capacity/.  If the journal or book
> community profiles are severely lacking,

It's not that they -- per se -- are lacking. It's that I cite far more
than journal articles and books: archival documents, government
reports, legislation, media sources.

OpenURL has to adopt the flat approach because it's primary use case
is to provide a url. But microformats (and indeed XML more generally)
have no such restriction, and it's really not hard to create a format
that will work for these different needs.

I guess my point is it's hard to fit a square peg (relational bib
data) in a round hole (flat data structures).

Bruce