[uf-discuss] Citation Straw Proposal II (Recap)

[Ryan Cannon]

> A given article citation is part of a journal (which is just another
> citation). The problem is that they would share ALOT of the same info
> (PubDate, Publisher, etc) It would be difficult to publish an article
> in a journal by two different publishers? (or i am off the mark here?)
> So i'm not sure how much benefit there is in nesting citations.

I like the idea of nesting citations. It's how our minds work in reading
citations. If I use:

Smith, John Q. "Microformats are great" Journal of Internet Technologies
vol. 1 no.1 (spring 1998) pp. 1-10.

What I'm really seeing is that "Microformats are great" is inheriting  
the
published dates of the nested citation for Journal of Internet  
Technologies.
Now, imagining John Smith had a web site and posted a PDF of the  
article:

Smith, John Q. "Microformats are great" John Smith's Web site 7 May  
1998.
7 May 2006 <http://johnqsmith.com/microformat>.

The "root" citation stays the same, while the nested citation changes.
This isn't an inheritance cascade like CSS. Parsers should have to  
handle
both citations, and link them.

> OUTSTANDING ISSUES:
> URL/UID
> the use of urls as IDs, and the use of additional protocols, such as
> ISBN, urn:, etc.

URL has two very different uses:

   * The URI of an document
   * Where that document can be obtained

While these are the same thing for web sites, for books a URL may be
to it's Amazon location, or the author's web site. The use case here
is an incline citation:

<a href="http://free-culture.cc/ class="title url">Free Culture</a>

http://free-culture.cc/ isn't a good UID for the book, the UID would
probably be the ISBN.

URL and UID ought to be separate properties. UID seems to have much
fewer uses, and be much less intuitive for use. The only solution I
could see to combining the two properties would rely on the format
of the document.

> Retrieved Date or Access Date
> this was first brought-up in the straw example discussion, so the new
> examples need to be folded into the schema. Can someone do a write-up
> of WHAT IS ACCESS DATE and how it differs and why it is important.
> Most of the cites between blogs, and places like Amazon.com, etc will
> never really use ACCESS DATE.

Access date is required for MLA citations, and (I believe) other  
academic
citation formats for Web resources. It is the date that the
person writing the citation actually acquired the network resource.
Having an access date is invaluable as the Web ages, because it allows
authors who are tracking resources no longer available online because it
allows for checking of places like archive.org.