Sorry for cross-posting, but this touches on different areas (ODF,
fields, metadata). This is a followup to today's IRC chat about the
bibliographic project plans ...
Part of what has swirled around the ODF metadata discussions,
including today, is the notion of a generic field that links to
metadata. This is basically what a citation is. Indeed, Mathias Bauer
asked if we could forget about the citation field and just
concentrate on citations as a general metadata problem.
So let's remember the requirements.
A citation is one or more references to a bibliographic source. Each
reference contains an id that matches the source, and optional
additional attributes.
Citation fields need to be able to regenerated, and to be sorted.
For example, if I am using an author-date citation style, and I have
two entries from the same author, then they need to be (optionally)
sorted by year, and (again, optionally) the author dropped from
subsequent.
Example: (Doe, 1999a, 2000).
In other words, the references cannot really be treated as separate
fields (I don't think) because rendering depends on the context.
Also, references can also include additional details, such as a
specific location in the source (usually a page number, but not always).
Example: (Doe, 1999: 23).
... where the "23" is a page number.
So citations are complex structured fields. And I don't think ODF or
OOo has anything now that can support this well.
The design of the new citation coding scheduled for ODF 1.2 accounts
for this, with a separate cite:source and cite:body element. But it
is a dedicated field for what could be generic.
The question is, can/should we find a more general XML structure to
do this?
What if we just made the citation field more generic? Like:
<text:structuredField text:type="citation">
<text:source>
<meta:reference meta:about="urn:isbn:23341245" cite:page="23"/>
<meta:reference meta:about="urn:isbn:12309341"/>
</text:source>
<text:body>
(Doe, 1999; Smith, 2000: 23)
</text:body>
</text:structuredField>
So probably the only specific content here is the "cite:page" attribute.
Would there be general value in this? Would it make it easier to
implement generic custom metadata support that citations could draw on?
Or are the details of this XML unimportant, and it would be enough if
the mechanism to link the content (citation) and (bibliographic)
source is consistent?
I'd like some feedback as we work on the ODF metadata proposal.
Bruce
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