DOCBOOK-APPS: Bibliography management/BibTex equivalent

[Markus Hoenicka <hoenicka_markus@compuserve.com>]

Hi,

Bernd Kreimeier writes:
 > Specifically: comments on:
 >   http://refdb.sourceforge.net/

See below...

 >   http://canvas.gnome.org:65348/pybliographer/

This is a bibliography database tool. As far as I can tell there is no
formatting or automatic bibliography creation from SGML or XML
documents.

 >   http://sourceforge.net/projects/jreferences/

This is a database tool that stores and retrieves DocBook bibliography
elements. It provides "autonumbering" of bibliography entries and
citations but does this apparently by mangling the document
source. I found no hint on formatting though.

 >   http://www.bitjungle.com/~bibtex/

This will apparently not work with DocBook, at least not without
modifying the DocBook DTD.

 >   http://carol.wins.uva.nl/~zegerh/bibteXML/
404?
 > 
 > 


 > I do not want to rely on the bibliomixed etc. "cooked" elements 
 > as they seem to be a procedural markup fallback for breakdown of 
 > biblioentry?
 > 

RefDB does use bibliomixed on purpose. I think the choice between raw
and cooked is a compromise between philosophy and ease of
implementation, speed of execution etc. I see the main purpose of
auto-generating bibliographies not in creating beautiful and
philosophically correct *source* documents, but to help users create
correct *formatted* output. The intermediate bibliography element is a
means to achieve this. The DocBook DTD explicitly defines the
bibliomixed element to create bibliographic output that would be too
tedious or complicated to create on the stylesheet level alone.

 > Has anybody created DocBook elements equivalent to BibTeX, and a 
 > transformation to DocBook biblioentry? And/or a conversion from 
 > BibTex DB files to DocBook? That would make it easier to maintain 
 > references as a BibTex-like SGML/XML collection.

RefDB can import BibTeX bibliographies and use these data to create
DocBook bibliographies.

Taken together, RefDB seems to be the only available tool to actually
format bibliographies and citations in the output created from SGML
and XML documents. RefDB does this without modifications of the
DocBook DTD, and without mangling the document source. RefDB is not
limited to DocBook, but does TEI as well and can be extended to any
other document type.
 
HTH
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka
hoenicka_markus@compuserve.com
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/hoenicka_markus/