Matthias Steffens wrote:
I would find it rather, uuhm, frustrating to see you (and the OOo
folks) move away from MODS. Especially since it was *you* who
convinced us to support it within our bibliographic applications.
;-)
:-)
However, could there be a solution where both formats go hand in
hand together and where OOo would simply accept both formats -- no
matter how it stores it's stuff internally?
Don't worry Matthias; I won't leave you hanging.
We haven't made any decisions. It's just that we're torn between at
least two different worlds: the library world that created MODS, and the
more journal publishing world associated with stuff like PRISM.
If we do decide on something other than MODS, then we will support MODS
as well in some form. I will write conversion code between the two if
necessary, talk to people like Chris Putnam about supporting it too, etc.
As for why I'm changing my mind on this:
It's a combination of a few things. The most important is that there's
been some interesting developments in the last few months around RDF bib
data:
Ingenta is moving to an RDF backend and will make these huge metadata
holdings available as RDF (and maybe MODS too, BTW).
CiteULike has become popular, and exports metadata as PRISM/RDF (though
again could support MODS as well).
There's a lot of interest in the Firefox plug-in Piggy Bank, including
from bib metadata providers.
Also, Adobe has joined the OpenDocument TC and is proposing that OD
switch to using its XMP/RDF framework for document metadata. If that
happens, it would provilege RDF for metadata in the file format.
The other issue is that there are two features I've been asking for in
MODS for awhile now (embedded content like mathml in titles and
abstracts and multiple names for a person to support international
scholars), with no luck. This leaves me uneasy with trusting our fate
with a large organization that represents a different community of users
than us.
Finally, technically speaking, MODS is really rich and expressive, but
it's also loose. If I was to prefer an alternative, it would be a much
tighter one, and so easier for developers to work with.
Remember, I spent a long time writing software dependent on MODS too, so
I'm not going to be stupid about this!
Bruce
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