Comment on bibliographic section of ODF

["Umberto Ko." <umbertoko@gmail.com>]

Dear members of the ODF-1.2 commission,

At first I will say: Sorry for my bad English... (I had to learn Russian at school, so google must help me in translation ;-) )

I look at the part of the documentation about the bibliographic information. For me it is the most interesting part. I write my PhD about citation, bibliographic data and the practises of scientists. I'm missing a field for raw bibliographic data (in XML) like MODS or "ONIX for books"... or any other XML based format.

The practise is, that many scientists has a literature database and will use the raw data (not only the formatted representation of it - as a bibliography item). Fields allowed under 8.1.11<text:bibliography-mark> are not repeatable (as attributes). So we can use only formatted strings with names one or more persons. Formatted text is not convert able to other citation norms like ISO 690 or DIN 1505-2. 

A field for "raw" data (for example as MODS) allows to transport pure bibliographic data and transform it to any norm of citation. The other thing is, that this data could be read by special programs, which manages private literature databases. (Import of data from text:bibliography-mark's is not a good idea because of many cases of personal names like "Holly X", "Pope Benedict XVI", "King X Y II" etc). I think, it can be very nice, to import foreign literature to own database and re-use it. It's more efficient (then a typing or copying formatted names in every file one more time) and user friendly.

Maybe it's to late to propose new fields, but maybe for the next version. I think, the bibliographic section of openoffice.org will be also pleased with this new possibility...

Best

Umberto