On Apr 3, 2006, at 9:55 PM, Matt Price wrote:
Looking over the tasks you laid out ("what needs to be done?") it
seems that very little can be accomplished on this front until the
database design is finalized. Is the design of this database actually
something under the control of the bibliographic project?
It's hosted at my xbib project site.
Or would it have to be approved by a central committee or even OASIS
first?
No, because it has little to do with the file format. That said, I am
designing it with mapping to/from RDF in mind, which is the likely
technology ODF will be using for enhanced metadata support in ODF. We
have tentatively scheduled that for inclusion in an interim release of
ODF early next year.
On the organization of the bibliographic database:
- I see there are no keywords. Is it assumed that keywords will
become a kind of note?
Right now, it's covered with the trendy term for the same thing: tags.
- unlike in refbase or refdb, there seems to be no way to associate a
set of references with a user (though notes are associated with
users). Is this a design decision?
No, it's not done yet. It seems, however, in our case we can't assume
multi-user systems, and the more common case will be single-user.
- is there any way at all to harmonize this database design effort
with one or more of the many FLOSS bibliographic projects? For
instance, as I understand it Refbase is considering mivng to a
non-flat DB, and I think even RefDB is looking at changing its DB
structure (again!). It would be so great to have input and support
from projects of that nature...
Anyone is free to contribute, but I don't have the energy to recruit
support for this, and to worry about accommodating legacy concerns. I
think Markus (of RefDB) and I, for example, have a different set of
concerns and priorities that partially reflect the fact that we come
from different parts of the research world; he a life scientist, and I
closer to the humanities.
My concern is creating a forward-looking design that also will work
with an RDF serialization. Ideally we'd be able to use some native RDF
store -- and who knows, that may be possible at some point -- but for
now it'd be nice to have something we could use with the existing OOo
RDBMS support.
So probably the approach will be to get it to a stage where we --
non-experts in database design but who know what we need in a data
model -- are happy with it, and then to have a database expert or two
go over it with fine-toothed comb. That would give the best mesh of
domain knowledge and technical expertise.
Overall, it seemsto me that a complex and flexible structure of this
kind necessitates some further elaboration of record types, so that
an OOo bibliographic db, when crated, could never be empty; instead,
there would have to be a well-populated set of
reference/relation/collection/event types from the get go.
Yes, I agree. It's worth noting that my RDF schema is designed to cover
just this:
<http://purl.org/net/biblio>
In fact, I just wrote a little script that turns that schema into Ruby
classes and subclasses :-)
So I'm thinking of trying to harmonize (using your word) the data model
and the input/output format so that it not only works well for us, but
also fits with the direction that we are helping to push ODF towards
(e.g. the initiative comes from others, but I'm encouraging it in ways
that will help us).
Bruce
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