On Mar 1, 2005, at 8:57 PM, Michael Bowman wrote:
My name is Michael Bowman. I'm a fairly experienced (2 yrs professionally) Java developer, though I do have experience with Python, Perl, and C++ (from my college days) as well. Linux w/Gnome is my primary OS.
Hi Michael -- welcome aboard.
I see *tons* of potential in this project and would really like to get involved.
Excellent!
I'm going to hope someone else can jump in and answer your other questions. I thought I'd just instead tell you where we're at these days, and load you up with some urls:
Most of us (well, really all of us) believe the current bibliographic support is so limited that it needs to be radically recoded. There are a number of steps in this process:
1) Rework the way citations are handled in the OpenDocument file format. I co-authored a small standalone schema with an engineer at Sun which has been approved by the OASIS TC. It will be formally integrated into the spec sometime in the next few months. So that critical step is done.
The purpose of the changes is to make it really easy to regenerate formatting in radically different styles without having to change the document source.
2) OOo itself needs to be enhanced to support the new citation coding. This needs to be done by Sun engineers, and we have some promise from Sun that they will dedicate resources for this after they release 2.0.
3) We are also going to ask them to implement a plug-in API based on ZOOM:
http://zoom.z3950.org/
So, we'd build the architecture around a unified local/remote query API. There are open source implementations in a variety of languages we could borrow.
The precise details are still to be determined, but one possibility is then to say that any database project that communicates via SRU (REST) and/or SRW (SOAP) and serves MODS XML records can be a plug-in for OpenOffice.
http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/zing/srw/sru.html http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/zing/srw/ http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/
4) I've been working on a side project that I'd like to see make it into here; it consists of an XML formatting language for citations, and an XSLT-based formatting engine:
http://xbiblio.sourceforge.net/citeproc.html
There are a number of cool things about this, but one of them is that the XSLT communicates with a database over HTTP. It would thus be trivial to add SRU support.
5) We have a GUI design guru working on a design documents
Still to be determined:
a. integration details
b. what persistence mechanism to use as default (I sort of like the idea of using an XML DB like BDB XML; there may be licensing issues there though)
c. who's going to code the GUI??
You mentioned your language background. I still haven't worked out the language issue in OOo. It seems C++ has the most mature support from what I've gathered. I've heard various complaints about the Java and Python support, but they may have been resolved.
What sort of stuff are you interested in contributing to? And what's your comfort level with XML?
Bruce
--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
