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

[Richard Hamilton <hamilton@xmlpress.net>]

Thanks Peter, Tony, and Norm for your thoughts,

A lot to consider here. After reading your replies, I looked further into BibTeX, CSL, and OpenCitation,
then branched even further, looking at the Initiative for Open Citations (not do be confused with OpenCitation),
and some of the applications that store encode bibliographic information.

To me, this boiled down to two broad questions:

- What guidance can these initiatives provide in designing markup conventions for biblioentry?

- How can these initiatives make it easier to process biblioentrys into multiple bibliographic formats?

My thoughts are that on the markup side, these projects donât provide much guidance that can be
applied directly to biblioentry. The main thing they do is provide help with identifying what information
needs to be captured for a wide variety of bibliographic types, but not much guidance on how to structure
that information consistently in biblioentry. And, given the variation in how biblioentry is used in practice,
I believe that some conventions are needed if we want to make biblioentry useful.

I think there is also a pretty good argument for being able to convert biblioentry into BibTeX (as Peter does)
and for converting BibTeX (or some of the other formats) into DocBook. There there are thousands of
citations available in some of these formats, often easily accessible in web databases. Being able to select
and convert citations into DocBook would give DocBook users access to a huge number of citations
(I searched around in one database and found one of the first conference papers I ever wrote, in 1979:-).

On the processing side, the style information that CSL or BibTeX encode might be used by a program to
generate a stylesheet that could process biblioentrys into any format that CSL or BibTeX has encoded
but it doesnât look like an easy job, so the question becomes whether it would be used by enough people
to justify the effort required to write such a program.

My opinion is that it is worth the effort to create a set of conventions for creating biblioentry elements and
for creating programs that would convert between biblioentry and one of the common citation standards, but
Iâm not convinced itâs worth the trouble to write a generalized program to take CLS or BibTeX style definitions
and convert them into XSL stylesheets to process biblioentries.

I think it would be easier to create modules similar to the ISO690 module, hopefully in a consistent manner
that could be easily modified to support other styles. I think you could handle a fairly large number of output
formats before you would come close to the amount of time it would take to create a reliable generalized
program, especially considering the issues that Norm found with CSL. If there were a bunch of people
clamoring for a whole bunch of different formats, that might be a reasonable course, but after 20+ years
of DocBook development, that doesnât seem to be the case.

Comments welcome.

Dick

P.S. Regarding my original question, I like Norm's idea to allow pubwork on biblioentry. Thoughts on
that are welcome, too.
-------
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hamilton@xmlpress.net



> On Jun 11, 2020, at 05:22, Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie> wrote:
> 
> On 11/06/2020 09:12, Norman Tovey-Walsh wrote:
>> The bibliography stuff is a bit of a mess. It was originally cribbed
>> from the Majour[1] standard in the very early 90âs, I believe, on the
>> assumption that reuse was better than reinvention. Iâm not sure what
>> happened to Majour after that.
> 
> I think it got dropped on the floor. But it influenced lots of bib DTDs.
> 
>> Thereâs *A LOT* of variation in how citations are published.
> 
> And a lot of hypercritical readers who will find that misplaced comma :-)
> 
>> <biblioentry>
>>   <citetitle pubwork="book">DocBook: The Definitive Guide</citetitle>
> 
> That's a nice idea.
> 
>> I think the title in a bibliography entry is more semantically a
>> title citation than a title, so thatâs my preference anyway. (In
>> DocBook, a <title> is usually the the title of a thing, and thatâs
>> not what is going on in a bibliography.)
> 
> Not sure about that. If the entry is for a book, the title element probably need to be the title of the book, not the title of something else.
> 
> Peter
> -- 
> I've been married so long I'm on my third bottle of Tabasco â Susan Vass
> 
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