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Subject: Re: [office] Metadata & Bibliography work (Bibus as a possible example?)



Hi David,

On Feb 14, 2006, at 11:40 AM, David A. Wheeler wrote:

> Bibus must have an internal data model of citations, and if it's
> truly able to handle many different formats, then perhaps it'd be
> a worthy example of a citation data model.

I'm afraid not. He made a design choice which I think was wrong, which 
was to base his data model on the existing bibliographic data model in 
OOo, which is really limited. Indeed, my interest in a general metadata 
extension system is precisely to get around these limitations ;-)

> I would VERY much like to see strong bibliographic support
> in OpenDocument applications; that could be a distinguishing
> (and VERY useful) capability.

Indeed. I would go further, which is to say that not only would it be a 
compelling feature in research, law and so forth -- an obvious 
advantage -- but that ODF cannot succeed in those fields without it 
(because of certain market forces and technical challenges mostly, 
which are tied in part to a lack of standardization).

> Perhaps examining Bibus would
> be helpful in determining how to improve things.
>
> (Yes, I know there's more to metadata than citations, but
> right now I perceive improved citation/reference support as the
> most immediate need.)

Bibliographic description and formatting is a good use case because 
it's very demanding, particularly when you get into the humanities and 
law. Given that I come from that end of the research spectrum, I 
appreciate these demands better than most of the people that write this 
software (who almost without exception come from the hard sciences, 
which have much less demanding needs in general) because, quite simply, 
I can't really publish without that knowledge.

My argument about where we need to go with metadata I think covers all 
of these needs fairly well.

I think I also have a good handle on how to handle citation formatting 
configuration, which is either through this standalone schema I wrote 
...

	<http://xbiblio.sourceforge.net/csl/>

... or, hopefully once we finish the metadata stuff, figuring out how 
to adapt the approach to ODF's styling system (which I don't think 
would be that hard given some recent changes I've made).

Such an approach could also be used to configure other kinds of 
metadata-sourced automatic formatting (captions and such).

Bruce



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