Re: [docbook] Biblioentry markup standards -- identifying the type of entry

[Richard Hamilton <hamilton@xmlpress.net>]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the reply.

Regarding LaTeX, do you use this tool chain in place of the DocBook XSLT .fo/.html stylesheets or do you integrate the two somehow? If itâs the former, thatâs not going to work for us because we have stylesheet customizations for both .fo and epub that I wouldnât want to try and duplicate in LaTeX.

Regarding marking the type on biblioentry, I agree that this should be done on the top-level biblioentry element. I was wondering about using the @typeof RDF attribute, but that seems to be abusing RDF markup (as opposed to abusing @role:-). The one advantage of abusing @role is that the existing iso690 customization uses @role.

The list of biblatex types you pointed me to looks comprehensive. It certainly didnât miss any type that I would ever use. I could see using that list, though Iâm not sure Iâd want to try and implement all of them.

I wasnât thinking of requiring biblioset on both parts of an inclusion. The biblatex types probably make that unambiguous, but I had been thinking that the biblioentry âtypeâ would refer to the actual thing youâre referring to (article, etc.), and biblioset would be used for the publication it was included in (journal, proceedings, etc).

What is the advantage of enclosing authors, editors, etc., in authorgroup? Is it just to make the processing easier (which I can certainly see) or is there a semantic purpose?

Thanks for taking the time to go into so much detail.

Dick
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hamilton@xmlpress.net



> On Jun 10, 2020, at 16:40, Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie> wrote:
> 
> On 10/06/2020 22:51, Richard Hamilton wrote:
>> Background: Iâve been using bibliomixed for XML Press publications. I
>> would like to move to using biblioentry, so I can cover more than one
>> output style. We primarily use the Chicago Manual of Style as our
>> guide, but I would like to be able to easily use other styles.
> 
> Should be no problem. I use biblioentry for all our bibliographic entries.
> 
>> My objective is to create (over time) customizations that would take
>> a biblioentry in a consistent format and generate output that
>> conforms to Chicago, APA, and other styles.
> 
> That is virtually trivial if you use biblatex to do the formatting. I have XSLT which transforms biblioentries to BiBTeX format, and I just let XeLaTeX do the heavy lifting with biblatex and biber (because that takes care of UTF-8, which the old bibtex program gags on). Mail me directly if you want details or code.
> 
>> As part of that effort, I decided first to look for and create test
>> examples for a variety of cases and begin creating guidelines.
> 
> That would be very useful. Our business rules are not yet codified :-)
> One thing I do try to enforce is that articles, conference papers, and chapters in books (all items that occur *inside* something else) use
> 
> <biblioentry>
>  <biblioset relation="article">
>   ...author[s] and title and page number...
>  </biblioset>
>  <biblioset relation="journal">
>   ...journal-related stuff...
>  </biblioset>
> </biblioentry>
> 
> and any mutiple authors or editors go inside authorgroup. This just avoids a mess of ambiguity later.
> 
>> This first issue Iâve uncovered is the question of how to identify
>> what kind of entry an instance is (e.g., book, article, etc.).
> 
> You can use the list in section 2.1 of the biblatex documentation at http://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/ctan.org/tex/macros/latex/contrib/biblatex/doc/biblatex.pdf#page=8
> 
> Every bibliographic software system uses a fractionally different terminology (some call an article a journal, for example) but the biblatex list is the most comprehensive I have seen. I define a new attribute on biblioentry, @type, which is the list of valid types from biblatex. Or you could hijack @role or @xreflabel or something. Give each one an ID:
> 
> <biblioentry xml:id="smith1996" type="article">
> 
>> I can find no standard method for doing that in DocBook, including the Publisherâs schema..
> 
> DocBook is a little reticent about bibliographic citation and reference.
> 
> The biblioref element type, for example, defines @linkend as IDREF
> instead of IDREFS, which you need in writing when you want to make
> multiple citations at a single point.
> 
>> The ISO690 extension uses the role attribute on the biblioentry element.
> We could argue forever about whether the type of document is a role :-)
> I've never been shy about abusing someone else's DTD :-)
> 
>> Certain types can be guessed at by looking at biblioset (if itâs
>> used) or the pubwork attribute on citetitle (if citetitle is used
>> rather than title).
> 
> Better to state it unambiguously in the biblioentry.
> 
>> Both of these apply only if you use those elements. However, there
>> are plenty of examples where biblioset is not needed 
> 
> All types except those where the work is published inside something else.
> 
>> and would just add complexity. And citetitle seems not to be the best
>> choice for expressing a title in this context (especially if you want
>> to separate out a subtitle).
> 
> citetitle is for citing titles in the body of the document. I use the @linkend attribute to point at the relevant biblioentry and leave the element empty because I'm lazy: the ID/IDREF mechanism will tell me if anything doesn't match, and it's easy to transclude the element with the title when you transform the document.
> 
>> So, am I missing something here, or is there no standard method for
>> defining the type of a biblioentry?
> 
> You are correct. Any good librarian will tell you there are lots of
> categorisation systems and none of them are as good as the one you
> invent yourself. But I prefer to re-use someone else's expert labour.
> 
>> If there isnât an established method, does anyone have any ideas on
>> how best to do this?
> 
> After 30+ years, I haven't found anything that beats the combination of SGML/XML and LaTeX/BiBTeX, so I'm heavily biased.
> 
> Peter
> 
> 
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