new bib example (firefox extension)

[Bruce D'Arcus <bruce.darcus@OpenDocument.us>]

Hi All,

An interesting case study that just went into private beta, and will 
soon be going public:

	<http://zotero.org>

I've been working with one of their developers who is implementing 
support for my Citation Style Language (CSL), as well as using some of 
my RDF work for import/export.

OK, so what's interesting for us?

Well, this is a Firefox extension, using the new Unified Storage 
support in 2.0. So they are storing their data in an embedded SQL 
database (SQLite).

If you look at the screenshot, they're actually doing a nice job 
exploiting the relational db. So you see nested collections (folders) 
where users can drag-and-drop their references, "smart collections" 
(named queries), notes, etc. These are all properly normalized, with 
separate tables for it all.

So where does RDF come in?

They wanted an easy way to express the relations (tags, notes, 
collections, attachments, creators, etc.) in consistent ways so they 
could reliably import and export it all.

So when they have a server setup for example (the next step), they'd 
want to be able to sync user data across local browsers, suck in data 
to send back recommendations (a la social network software) and so 
forth.

And they have found RDF much easier to use for this than any 
alternatives.

So here we have a practical example of what I'm talking WRT to 
extensibility. A lot of those relations they might want to transport 
would be fairly specific to their application (though I hope we'll see 
more projects support them over time when they see how useful they 
are), and in any case not something important to ODF per se. What 
matters to ODF is primarily the data to format the citations and 
bibliographic entries.

But this project might well want to transport that extended metadata 
along with the stuff that is standardized (title, date, etc.).

They are really interested, BTW, in plugging into desktop applications. 
Not surprisingly, their first step will be Word. But am hoping to 
convince them the second ought to be ODF (and probably OOo in fact). 
One of their developers has read my requirements, and was happy with 
them.

Bruce