Re: bib amd mods

[Ulf Martin <ulfmartin@web.de>]

Hi again folks,

IMHO a good, flexible bibliographic format that plays well with the 
other strength of ConTeXt (e.g. XML support) could be sort a killer 
feature...

Bruce D'Arcus schrieb:
> The big question becomes, if not MODS, then what? As Ulf pointed out, my
> solution -- and the one I will be advocating for OpenDoucment (I am on the TC)
> -- is to use a particular RDF serialization. Indeed, I have a draft RELAX NG
> schema for it, and my formatting system (citeproc) now works with it quite well.
...
> I can certainly help with advice and design, particularly if you want to use CSL
> to configure the output. I've made some changes to it (again) recently, but
> think I'm zeroing in on freezing it. The more feedback I get, the easier it'll
> be to do that.

I think the crucial point for any TeX community is the ability to use 
the rather huge amount of BibTeX legacy DBs.

How about the state of CSL (or RDF) to BibTeX converters?

bibutils uses MODS as its native intermediate format and converts from 
and to BibTeX (not always 100% correct, though).


Summary
-------

So, at present we already have:

(1)  MODS <-(bibutils)-> BibTeX -(bibmod)-> ConTeXt

For an XML-based format in a ConTeXt context we would like to have:

(2)  BibTeX <-(a)-> XML -(b)-> ConTeXt

using the rather nice XML processing capabilities of ConTeXt for
step (b).

Now, there is an XML markup for BibTeX: BibTeXML
http://bibtexml.sourceforge.net/
This isn't too bad, in my experience (it is, at least, lossless, 
contrary to bibutils). Thus

(3)  BibTeX <-(bibtexml)-> BibTeXML -(b')-> ConTeXt

would be an instance of (2).

CSL could use XSL transformer:

(4)  BibTeXML <-(XSLT)-> CSL -(b")-> ConTeXt


Bye
Ulf