On Apr 5, 2006, at 10:19 AM, Matthias Steffens wrote:
no offense itended, I was just interested about the details. ;-)
None taken Matthias :-)
On Wed, 5-Apr-2006 10:06 -0400, Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
Also, how do you account for duplicate database entries where only
one
of these duplicates is the user's desired record. In institutional
databases, duplicate entries are not uncommon and their accuracy or
quality may differ substantially. Thus, it *does* matter which of
these
copies you fetch. User-specific keys as well as local database
numbers
would solve this particular problem.
Hold on now; the user *may* be important, but not the user-specific
key.
If I ping a server and give a list of isbns and dois and an optional
username, problem solved; no?
Yes and no, It depends on the quality of the bibliographic data. If all
of the duplicate records contain an ISBN or DOI, then I agree that the
username is all what's needed. But very often, users are lazy and enter
only the basic bibliographic fields. Or, the data were imported from
legacy data (such as BibTeX records). This means that it is possible
that none of the records in question feature any unique identifier. But
often, a cite key is present. In this case, the username would not
suffice while the cite key or a local database number would do.
Please note that I'm not arguing against you here, I just know the
(often frustrating) reality of dealing with an institutional literature
database. At our institute, we have a lot entries that would fit the
above scenario.
OK, fair enough. But we need to design the system to enable what I'm
arguing for as ideal I think. The fallback can well be that for some
users with poor data sources, their citation uris are rather dumb uris
like:
person:[EMAIL PROTECTED]:smith99
But we need to start getting with the network here, so that it'll even
be possible for a user to be reading a book they want to cite, add a
citation by typing in the isbn in the citation id field, and OOoBib
will grab that relevant record from the Library of Congress server.
Likewise for DOIs.
E.g., I would hope that in five years, users NEVER have to create their
own (bad) citation data.
I should also add that using uris for association is likely what will
be the outcome of the metadata work at the ODF TC. It provides a
standard and general mechanism to link content and metadata.
How's that?
Bruce
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