Re: m-bib, xml, etc.

["Bruce D'Arcus" <darcusb@muohio.edu>]

Taco Hoekwater wrote:

>On Mon, 5 Aug 2002 11:05:04 -0400 (EDT), Bruce wrote:
>> 
>> Sounds great!  I can't comment on any technical issues because I don't 
>> know much about xml.  I do, however, know what I need in a bib system, 
>> and so will be happy to give input going forward.  It sounds like I 
>> ought to wait a bit before moving my fairly complex bib database off 
of 
>> Endnote though, and go with xml rather than bibtex.  
>
>You can assume that the XML bibtex format is roughly
>the current bibtex functionality + explicit tagging for
>the parts of an author's name, separated keywords, and
>support for subtitles. Just think about what features you
>miss in bibtex and write those down, that will be quite
>helpful.

In general, any new xml-based system should not inherit the limitations 
of previous approaches.  What I am about to say may indicate some 
ignorance of BibTeX, with which I am not intimately familiar, so take 
it for it's worth (and correct me if I'm wrong!):

I am a social scientist whose work is basically historial.  So I often 
have record types that are not explcitly supported in BibTeX.  Archival 
records are easy enough to deal with I suppose (I can just use fields 
like "where published" to indicate archives, collections, box numbers, 
etc.), but what about an archival document that is a memo.  In my 
dissertation, the bib entry might look like this:

Smith J. to N. Scott (1973) memo.  Smith files, box 23, folder 2.

I have no idea how to do this in BibTeX.  I imagine I could cite this 
differently though and get around the problem.

The other issue is citing in footnotes (or also common, endnotes), in 
which the first citation lists the entire reference, and subsequent 
ones shortened versions.

Finally, my biggest issue is this:

Exactly how do I write documents such that I can easily produce not 
just beautiful pdf output via pdftex, but also some format that word 
processors (Word) and dtp apps can import?  It doesn't seem tagged pdf 
is coming anytime soon.  In theory, a ConTeXt to html script would 
work, but I'm not aware of this coming soon either.  Finally, given 
support for xml in ConTeXt and your interest in moving m-bib in this 
direction, I suppose I could just write in xml.

Any insight on this issue--which is absolutely essential for me--would 
be much appreciated...

>> Any sense of timeframe here Taco?
>
>Couple of weeks I think, it has taken long enough by now ;)

Wow; great!

>> Also, has anyone taken a look at refDB?  
>> 
>> see http://refdb.sourceforge.net
>> 
>> It's a bib system built on MySQL that processes both Docbook and LaTeX 
>> documents.
>
>The XML files that define the formatting stylesheets are quite 
>interesting. I think I will adopt these instead of the current
>TeX syntax. 
>
>Their input format for bibliographic data is not XML though,
>but RIS. I'm not overly please with that, and using docbook or 
>tei markup for bibliographic databases is probably a mistake, 
>so I vote for sticking with the bibtex-DTD.

OK, but adding RIS (or refer) import to m-bib would really help me out, 
as BibTeX export from an app like Endnote is less-than-ideal!