Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
I think one of the stumbling blocks we're having here is trying to figure out what we're really using citations for. 1) There's obviously a group that wants this data to be used with bibliographic management software 2) There's a group that wants these citations to be able to link to fulltext/print/etc. for any person's library 3) There's a group (I think?) that wants to be able to display properly formatted citations (or, at least more properly). Are we leaving a scenario out? #3 seems the most complicated. If the goals of #1 are met, then #2 will most likely be met, as well (although not necessarily the reverse). Does this seem accurate? -Ross. On 7/30/06, Edward Summers [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Jul 30, 2006, at 2:08 PM, Tantek Çelik wrote: What if we set a goal for hCite 0.1 of August 30? Is that reasonable? If Brian Suda has the spare cycles I think this is an excellent idea. The citation effort has gone on for a long time, so Simon's questions are most welcome. //Ed___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
Ross Singer: 1) There's obviously a group that wants this data to be used with bibliographic management software 2) There's a group that wants these citations to be able to link to fulltext/print/etc. for any person's library 3) There's a group (I think?) that wants to be able to display properly formatted citations (or, at least more properly). I think I'm in group 0. :) I just want to mark up the fact that bits of my pages are talking about books, so that other semantic web applications (All Consuming, etc.) can eat my data. I kind of thought that was what it was all about. -- Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. - Henry Spencer, University of Toronto Unix hack ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
Why don't we call you '#4', rather than '0' (sheesh!). And, yes, this is, obviously, a fairly large (and good) use case. Although, honestly, if you're just trying to say, This is a book, UID might be a better choice (I mean, if you're really just identifying things). -Ross. On 7/31/06, Simon Cozens [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ross Singer: 1) There's obviously a group that wants this data to be used with bibliographic management software 2) There's a group that wants these citations to be able to link to fulltext/print/etc. for any person's library 3) There's a group (I think?) that wants to be able to display properly formatted citations (or, at least more properly). I think I'm in group 0. :) I just want to mark up the fact that bits of my pages are talking about books, so that other semantic web applications (All Consuming, etc.) can eat my data. I kind of thought that was what it was all about. -- Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. - Henry Spencer, University of Toronto Unix hack ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
I do have some spare cycles (not many), but i'm always up for a challenge, August 30 is acceptable. p class=shameless-plug I have to prep some for my talk at EuroOSCON in september, hopefully i can add some citation stuff in there as well. If anyone else will be attended feel free to say hello in person. /p p class=shameless-plug The other thing that is keeping very busy is that i am putting some final touches on a Introduction to Microformats eBook for O'Reilly, which is due in a few weeks. It is part of their shortcuts series and i'll post a link once it is available. /p A few of the other things to clarify and point out from where we left off and to bring people up to speed. 1) The list of properties available in the straw proposal may look long and unweildy, but that is just a FRACTION of what was available. It may not seem like we started simple but if you knew what is out there, you'd realise that we did! The way we arrived at those properties are as follows: We examined several of the most popular formats, and took the UNION of their common terms. We then examined examples in the wild and then took a UNION of those terms and the common terms of the formats to arrive at the short list in the strawman. 2) Much like hCard, you don't have to use the FULL microformat. hCard has options for ORG, ADR, etc. If you wanted to just represent a structured name, there is no need to create a microformat, just use the parts of hCard you need. This citation microformat will be similar. If you want to JUST have a book title, then this format will sufice, it is just like any of the other microformats, beyond the required properties, everything is optional! 3) One of the other things we wanted to look out for was the emergence of the media-info format. There has been some movement on that. We wanted to be sure that the way a citation describes a book/CD/DVD is not incompatable to that of a media-info format. Arguing end-user formats, i think, it is moot. Once we have a solid citation microformat that covers the 80/20 of the common terms within the citation formats AND citations in the wild, you will be able to transform that HTML into BibTeX, COiNS, OpenURL, MS Word ODF Citation, CSV, or any that pop-up in the future - you can even style it in Plain-Text as MLA, Chicago Style, or any other. I'll do some homework and get caught-up with all the developments since our last major discussion. -brian On 7/30/06, Edward Summers [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Jul 30, 2006, at 2:08 PM, Tantek Çelik wrote: What if we set a goal for hCite 0.1 of August 30? Is that reasonable? If Brian Suda has the spare cycles I think this is an excellent idea. The citation effort has gone on for a long time, so Simon's questions are most welcome. //Ed___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss -- brian suda http://suda.co.uk ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
On 7/31/06, Ross Singer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think one of the stumbling blocks we're having here is trying to figure out what we're really using citations for. 1) There's obviously a group that wants this data to be used with bibliographic management software 2) There's a group that wants these citations to be able to link to fulltext/print/etc. for any person's library 3) There's a group (I think?) that wants to be able to display properly formatted citations (or, at least more properly). Are we leaving a scenario out? #3 seems the most complicated. If the goals of #1 are met, then #2 will most likely be met, as well (although not necessarily the reverse). Does this seem accurate? On 3, I've been working on cracking the formatting nut for the past couple years, and am just about done [1]. It is indeed quite difficult, but I mostly see it as distantly related to hCite. But I see citation metadata as a cycle. I want ulitmately to be able to output good uF metadata such that users can: - view a nicely formatted document in their browser, complete with proper citations - click some button and go to the original article or book - click some other thingy and import citations into my browser-based reference database (coming real soon, GPL licensed!), or copy-and paste the citation content directly into Word or OpenOffice - be able to use that data to create other documents with citations So yeah, a good data format supports 3, though is not so much its own requirement. Bruce [1] http://netapps.muohio.edu/blogs/darcusb/darcusb/archives/2006/07/29/csl-progress ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
On Jul 30, 2006, at 3:37 AM, Ciaran McNulty wrote: (It may be possible to do without the inner DIV and apply the fn to the outer one, I'm not 100% clear on whether the fn has to be on a child element of the vcard). FAQ: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-faq (#17). -ryan ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
Ross, I think one of the stumbling blocks we're having here is trying to figure out what we're really using citations for. ... Are we leaving a scenario out? I have a lot of interest shown by Australian government developers - basically every one I mention ufs to independently says a format for citations would be great. What they need is for is that any time a government publication refers to any other publication (a site, a book, a pamphlet on immunisation, a poster on healthy diets, whatever) they have to cite it. But of course there is no citation format. I actually am planning a developer day in the next month or so for government web developers to introduce the ideas and take a good long look at hCite from the perspective of the uf principles. I actually think a reasonably minimal set of properties would suffice for their needs, but hope to find out first hand soon. BTW, any Australian, particularly Canberra based (I'm in Sydney but the interest is federal government developers) people, but really anyone keen to meetup in either place and or chat more on this, please drop me a line john #3 seems the most complicated. If the goals of #1 are met, then #2 will most likely be met, as well (although not necessarily the reverse). Does this seem accurate? -Ross. On 7/30/06, Edward Summers [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Jul 30, 2006, at 2:08 PM, Tantek Çelik wrote: What if we set a goal for hCite 0.1 of August 30? Is that reasonable? If Brian Suda has the spare cycles I think this is an excellent idea. The citation effort has gone on for a long time, so Simon's questions are most welcome. //Ed___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss John Allsopp style master :: css editor :: http://westciv.com/style_master blog :: dog or higher :: http://blogs.westciv.com/dog_or_higher WebPatterns :: http://webpatterns.org Web Directions Conference :: Sydney September 28-29 :: http://wd06.com ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
[uf-discuss] Easy book citations
Hello folks; please don't shoot, I'm new here. I've noticed on the wiki that there's a relatively long discussion about citation formats, tending to focus on creating microformats for full academic citations. From my point of view, this seems to go against the start as simple as possible principle, but let's move on. I'm looking for something simpler and something a bit more immediate. I'm working on an online book recommendation site (http://www.youneedtoreadthis.com/) which will, obviously, display a lot of information about books. I'd like that to contain semantic markup for all the books: nothing too fancy, just title, author, maybe ISBN. I would imagine that this is a fairly common usage case. Can I do this yet? Is there a citation format ready to use right now? -- If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong. -- Norm Schryer ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
Lead by example. If you can get some use out of authoring your own xhtml semantics, do it! Document your process, add it to the appropriate wiki pages. The citation format suffers so much from rhetorical discussion, that I think an account of actual experience in implementation would do nothing but help push the process further towards something useful. The citation microformat is one cowpath that has not quite yet been paved, it would seem. On Jul 30, 2006, at 2:53 AM, Simon Cozens wrote: f the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong. -- Norm Schryer ___ ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
Breton Slivka: Lead by example. If you can get some use out of authoring your own xhtml semantics, do it! OK, let's have a go: http://www.youneedtoreadthis.com/book/view/0596102356 I don't consider the authorgroup and the metadata to be part of the uformat, they're just presentational - for me, at least. (metadata is a silly name if you think about it, it's all metadata.) Someone said that the citation uformat should use hcards for authors; this is probably an ideal situation, but not necessarily practical in all cases - for instance, I'm slurping author data from Amazon and don't have control of how it segments into first, middle, last names, etc. But I think this is a reasonable start. -- So what if I have a fertile brain? Fertilizer happens. -- Larry Wall in [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
Someone said that the citation uformat should use hcards for authors; this is probably an ideal situation, but not necessarily practical in all cases - for instance, I'm slurping author data from Amazon and don't have control of how it segments into first, middle, last names, etc. You don't need to partition names, I believe the minimal hCard is something like: div class=vcarddiv class=fnCiaran McNulty/div/div (It may be possible to do without the inner DIV and apply the fn to the outer one, I'm not 100% clear on whether the fn has to be on a child element of the vcard). -Ciaran ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
I think microformat citations are a great idea. The good news is the hard work has already been done for us. The .bib citation format is a flexible, open, and widely used bibliographic format. It is the LaTeX reference managaer, but it is widely used and adopted by many reference-management applications (Including the glorious Bibdesk, Refworks) and software applications (OpenOffice, LaTeX, Word?). I believe our task could be as simple as microformatting the bib format. We'd have guaranteed interoperability, and we'd be leveraging the hard work of many before us in defining the namespace. I would warn us away from attempting to change the namespace. Bibliographic citation formats need loose flexibility to interoperate with the many types of citation managers out there, and bib has done a good job with this so far. There is a draft DC standard on .bib as well. Here's a primer on .bib and bibtex, from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BibTeX I would be willing to offer assistance in making this a reality. If we are going to take up citations, I strongly urge us to go the .bib route. -Fred On Sun, 30 Jul 2006, Breton Slivka wrote: Lead by example. If you can get some use out of authoring your own xhtml semantics, do it! Document your process, add it to the appropriate wiki pages. The citation format suffers so much from rhetorical discussion, that I think an account of actual experience in implementation would do nothing but help push the process further towards something useful. The citation microformat is one cowpath that has not quite yet been paved, it would seem. On Jul 30, 2006, at 2:53 AM, Simon Cozens wrote: f the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong. -- Norm Schryer ___ ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss -- Fred Stutzman claimID.com 919-260-8508 AIM: chimprawk ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
Fred Stutzman: Well, indeed, but wouldn't defining a new standard just contribute another to this list? I am neither suggesting we do or we don't accept BibTeX, and am neither suggesting we use or we don't use another namespace. I'm just saying, get something working and build from that. The history of the Internet shows that it really doesn't matter *what* you start from. Now, it is a happy coincidence that the microformat I've created as an ad-hoc thing and am using on You Need To Read This uses exactly the same namespace as BibTeX - but that is because author, title and book are pretty obvious names for the things they describe. :) -- A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God. ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
On 7/30/06 1:53 AM, Simon Cozens [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello folks; please don't shoot, I'm new here. Hi Simon and welcome to the list! I've noticed on the wiki that there's a relatively long discussion about citation formats, tending to focus on creating microformats for full academic citations. From my point of view, this seems to go against the start as simple as possible principle, but let's move on. This is an excellent point of perspective to raise, and rather than moving on, I recommend you add a statement about a citation format as simple as possible to the citation-brainstorming page: http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-brainstorming I'm looking for something simpler and something a bit more immediate. I'm working on an online book recommendation site (http://www.youneedtoreadthis.com/) which will, obviously, display a lot of information about books. I'd like that to contain semantic markup for all the books: nothing too fancy, just title, author, maybe ISBN. I would imagine that this is a fairly common usage case. The way to determine if it *is* a fairly common usage case or not is to document real world examples using the wiki. Fortunately a bunch of folks have started doing this. http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-examples That being said, if you have a set of really simple citation examples found on the Web I strongly urge you to add them to that wiki page. Can I do this yet? Is there a citation format ready to use right now? Not yet. There is the cite tag for enclosing the entire citation, but nothing formal has been developed for distinguishing the structure. There are some proposals on the brainstorming page that you can try using and see if they work for you: http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-brainstorming Continuing in the thread... On 7/30/06 7:59 AM, Fred Stutzman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think microformat citations are a great idea. Hi Fred and thanks! The good news is the hard work has already been done for us. The .bib citation format is a flexible, open, and widely used bibliographic format. snip I believe our task could be as simple as microformatting the bib format. If the bib format was the overwhelmingly dominant bibliographic/citation format, it could be that simple. But it is not. It is one of many formats in wide use. See: http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-formats For the documentation and research that has been done on this. If you have additional data on usage, *please* add it to the existing documentation. The last time the which format is newest / most widely in use / most interoperable questions were asked, I believe OpenURL was the answer. I could be mistaken, I've only been on the periphery of the citation microformat work and there are several others here who are much more familiar with the state of the work. I would warn us away from attempting to change the namespace. I'll put it another way, whatever the research in citation *examples* http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-examples leads us to in terms of 80/20 citation properties and schema, we very much SHOULD re-use the names of properties from one or more existing *formats*. I would be willing to offer assistance in making this a reality. Great! First I would like to point you to the microformats process: http://microformats.org/wiki/process Second, the folks working on the citation microformat to date have done *a lot* of work along the lines of the process which I recommend you read to understand the current state of progress: http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-examples http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-formats http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-brainstorming http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-faq If we are going to take up citations, I strongly urge us to go the .bib route. We might end up re-using from the .bib vocabulary, and we might use another vocabulary (OpenURL) instead, or some other. Once there is consensus on the 80/20 schema from the examples, it is reasonable to discuss the merits of the various pre-existing citation formats in order to decide which vocabulary to re-use. Thanks, Tantek ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
On 7/30/06 9:47 AM, Fred Stutzman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sun, 30 Jul 2006, Simon Cozens wrote: Fred Stutzman: I believe our task could be as simple as microformatting the bib format. That's a good idea, but could easily get bogged down in months of committee work (http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-formats) so I think it's probably better to have something simple working and build on it when required. Well, indeed, but wouldn't defining a new standard just contribute another to this list? Given how much pre-existing work there is it would be insane to define yet another different standard. Bib is widely adopted by consumers, industry and academia - it is used in many reference management applications. snip In terms of real world use, I've got stuff on my desktop and in my browser that can deal with bib, but not with DC or Z39.80. Fred this is very interesting data. If you could add this specific documentation (desktop apps, browser extensions etc.) to the citation-formats page, that would be *very* helpful in deciding which vocabulary to subset etc. http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-formats So the question is, what do we define as something simple working Being able to represent the 80/20 of existing citations published on the Web (per the examples research). Some have suggested that even that might be too much and that we should start with 60/40 coverage which I think may be a reasonable proposal. Do we expect people to write new software and translation layers? A bit, yes. Hopefully by keeping it *simple* and a 1:1 subset mapping to parts of an existing citation format the transforms will be relatively easy to write. Thanks, Tantek ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
On 7/30/06, Tantek Çelik [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 7/30/06 7:59 AM, Fred Stutzman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think microformat citations are a great idea. Hi Fred and thanks! The good news is the hard work has already been done for us. The .bib citation format is a flexible, open, and widely used bibliographic format. snip I believe our task could be as simple as microformatting the bib format. If the bib format was the overwhelmingly dominant bibliographic/citation format, it could be that simple. But it is not. It is one of many formats in wide use. Correct, and it frustrates me to no end whenever some BibTeX user pops up and says this. It's just not true. Moreover, it's just a bad model. The last time the which format is newest / most widely in use / most interoperable questions were asked, I believe OpenURL was the answer. I could be mistaken, I've only been on the periphery of the citation microformat work and there are several others here who are much more familiar with the state of the work. I think the place where we were heading -- we meaning collective consensus informed by tons of research and practical implementation experience -- is some standard properties like: contributors (reusing hcard for the markup) author editor translator publisher dates = date accessed locator numbers === volume issue document page titles title short-title translated-title I've long been arguing we need some relational -- dcterms:isPartOf like -- structure, but in my more recent work on my citation style language (and a few different software implementations of it, includiing one a guy is writng in Javascript for a forthcoming Firefox extension *), I've come to the conclusion tha the only critical structures that need some relational sugar are titles. Allowing span class=title seriesSeries Title/span keeps things simple while allowing a lot of flexibilty. It would also make sense to allow them on contributors, so that you easily get series editors and such. Bruce * http://netapps.muohio.edu/blogs/darcusb/darcusb/archives/2006/07/29/csl-progress ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
On 7/30/06, Simon Cozens [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Now, it is a happy coincidence that the microformat I've created as an ad-hoc thing and am using on You Need To Read This uses exactly the same namespace as BibTeX - but that is because author, title and book are pretty obvious names for the things they describe. :) Actually, book shows the problem with the BibTeX model. It's not at all obvious. Now, if you had book title, then maybe. But that's only when you are encoding chapters. If you have a standalone book, then you use title. OTOH, if you just have a single title structure and allow it to include an additional class attribute to qualify it (like container or publication), problem solved. Bruce ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
Tantek ?elik: http://microformats.org/wiki/process Second, the folks working on the citation microformat to date have done *a lot* of work along the lines of the process which I recommend you read to understand the current state of progress: http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-examples http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-formats http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-brainstorming http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-faq Oh, I've read it all. I'm just of the opinion that following process, collating examples, performing analysis, holding discussion, forming consensus, trialling implementations, reviewing implementations, and issuing specifications is a way to ensure that nothing gets done, ever. The citation process started a year ago. There's still, apparently, nothing I can use today - at least, nothing better than the ad-hocery I just created. -- If a 6600 used paper tape instead of core memory, it would use up tape at about 30 miles/second. -- Grishman, Assembly Language Programming ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
On 7/30/06, Simon Cozens [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Bruce D'Arcus:
BibTeX - but that is because author, title and book are pretty
obvious names for the things they describe. :)
[ Something about a problem ]
OTOH, if you just have a single title structure and allow it to
include an additional class attribute to qualify it (like container
or publication), problem solved.
I do, yes. There wasn't a problem to be solved. :) My format looks like
div class=book
span class=title Foo /span
/div
BibTeX has
@Book{Thingy,
title = { Foo }
}
Looks rather similar. But I didn't design it that way consciously because of
BibTeX - I designed it that way because it seemed to be the simplest and most
obvious way of doing it.
No, books per se are the easiest things in the world ot model, and
it's hard to ever find an argument about this one.
The examples I am referring to -- and which start to show difficulty
-- are thiings like parts (chapters) within books. If you encode the
title for the book as span class=publication titleBook
Title/span (or use container instead of publication), then
great!
If, OTOH, you insist on span class=book-titleBook Title/span
(e.g. a single class attribute, a la BibTeX) then I'm afraid I'll have
to fight you tooth-and-nail ;-)
Perhaps the authors of BibTeX thought so too. :)
I'll be blunt: BibTeX is a hack. It was written by a scientist (no
consideration of the needs of humanities or social sciences people)
before the internet, before unicode, widely available relational
databases, before XML, etc, and it shows.
Bruce
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Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
On 7/30/06, Simon Cozens [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Oh, I've read it all. I'm just of the opinion that following process, collating examples, performing analysis, holding discussion, forming consensus, trialling implementations, reviewing implementations, and issuing specifications is a way to ensure that nothing gets done, ever. The citation process started a year ago. There's still, apparently, nothing I can use today - at least, nothing better than the ad-hocery I just created. Do you really think that consensus on a difficult topic ilke this is easy? Sure, we all can create ad hoc stuff. The point is to come to some collective aggreement (though see below). I think if you couple my suggested list of properties with Brian's straw man from awhile back, you'll kniow where we are: http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2006-April/thread.html#3952 I pinged Brian about gettnig back to this a few days ago. He's been swamped with other things, but sid time would open up soon-ish. I should also add for the record that the participants in this discussion were moving toowards consensus after an IRC meetup, but Tantek had rather a different idea of process that left a lot of us frustrated: http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2006-April/thread.html#3643 Bruce ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
On 7/30/06 10:35 AM, Simon Cozens [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Tantek ?elik: http://microformats.org/wiki/process Second, the folks working on the citation microformat to date have done *a lot* of work along the lines of the process which I recommend you read to understand the current state of progress: http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-examples http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-formats http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-brainstorming http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-faq Oh, I've read it all. Excellent. I'm just of the opinion that following process, collating examples, performing analysis, holding discussion, forming consensus, trialling implementations, reviewing implementations, and issuing specifications is a way to ensure that nothing gets done, ever. Not true. hReview was very successfully developed, deployed, and is now adopted widely per the process. The citation process started a year ago. There's still, apparently, nothing I can use today - at least, nothing better than the ad-hocery I just created. Citations are *particularly* difficult given how many smart people have tried to solve this particular problem in the past. I do think that we are getting *very close* to a draft hCite, and perhaps it is time that we as a community focused on making that happen in the next few weeks. What if we set a goal for hCite 0.1 of August 30? Is that reasonable? In addition, I definitely encourage you to continue with the ad-hoccery and experimentation with your own site and content. That's exactly the kind of experience that can help with making a practical microformat. Thanks much for your input, efforts, and for bringing up the citation microformat again. Sometimes is just takes *one more* person to bring something up before it is solved. Tantek ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
On Sun, 30 Jul 2006, Bruce D'Arcus wrote: If the bib format was the overwhelmingly dominant bibliographic/citation format, it could be that simple. But it is not. It is one of many formats in wide use. Correct, and it frustrates me to no end whenever some BibTeX user pops up and says this. It's just not true. Moreover, it's just a bad model. Well, of course it isn't the overwhelmingly dominant bibliographic/citation format - but most of these citation formats are deployed largely for machine-machine utilization (Z39.80 for example). I'm not going to stand up here and defend bib as perfect, but I will stand up and defend it as adopted. The simple fact of the matter is *many,many* vendors support export and ingest of bib format citations. In fact, unless you want to use RefWorks and a few other smaller, proprietary citation managers, bib is the only open game. Of course, we can dream up blue-sky scenarios on how to make a better citation format. I'm sure we can do better. But if we do, we miss the boat and lose the collective value of all the software that would natively support the format. Anyway, I'll be happy to fill out the wiki with software that supports bib. Thanks, Fred The last time the which format is newest / most widely in use / most interoperable questions were asked, I believe OpenURL was the answer. I could be mistaken, I've only been on the periphery of the citation microformat work and there are several others here who are much more familiar with the state of the work. I think the place where we were heading -- we meaning collective consensus informed by tons of research and practical implementation experience -- is some standard properties like: contributors (reusing hcard for the markup) author editor translator publisher dates = date accessed locator numbers === volume issue document page titles title short-title translated-title I've long been arguing we need some relational -- dcterms:isPartOf like -- structure, but in my more recent work on my citation style language (and a few different software implementations of it, includiing one a guy is writng in Javascript for a forthcoming Firefox extension *), I've come to the conclusion tha the only critical structures that need some relational sugar are titles. Allowing span class=title seriesSeries Title/span keeps things simple while allowing a lot of flexibilty. It would also make sense to allow them on contributors, so that you easily get series editors and such. Bruce * http://netapps.muohio.edu/blogs/darcusb/darcusb/archives/2006/07/29/csl-progress ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss -- Fred Stutzman claimID.com 919-260-8508 AIM: chimprawk ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
On 7/30/06, Fred Stutzman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sun, 30 Jul 2006, Bruce D'Arcus wrote: The examples I am referring to -- and which start to show difficulty -- are thiings like parts (chapters) within books. If you encode the title for the book as span class=publication titleBook Title/span (or use container instead of publication), then great! Bib natively supports inbook citations. I'm not sure I see what the problem is? The problem is the totally flat data model, and fields like booktitle and journal. These are basically hacks to suggest implicitly the relation in question. They work within their narrow realms, but they break when you deal with even subtly different relations and reference types: newspaper articles, legal cases (published in court reporters, which are just a kind of periodical/publication), etc., etc. The thing you have to recognize in designing a good, extensible, format is that biblioigraphic data is fundmentally relational. It makes sense to hide that complexity where you can, but there are some places where I think it's really bad pratice to do so. Title is an example. Bruce ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
On 7/30/06, Fred Stutzman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Well, of course it isn't the overwhelmingly dominant bibliographic/citation format It's not even close. If you ask 100 people in my field about BibTeX, my guess is at least 90 of them of them won't even know what you're talking about. Of course, a lot of them probbaly manually author their bibliographies (!), but still RIS and Endnote are perhaps even more widely supported formats for personal reference management. Both of those formats are based on a more general three level model. Of course, we can dream up blue-sky scenarios on how to make a better citation format. I'm sure we can do better. But if we do, we miss the boat and lose the collective value of all the software that would natively support the format. Regardless of the end result, you will need software to convert from legacy formats into and out of hCite. There is no way around that. I've done enough work on this stuff -- and worked with other developers; people like Chris Putnam on his excellent bibutils converion tools -- to tell you that it's pretty easy to design a a good format that will be easy to use, extend, and process. Nothing blue sky about it. And it won't be hard to convert into and out of BibTeX either (except, of course, where BibTeX's limited data structure gets in the way). But if you follow the BibTeX way strictly (where all properties are single values) you will end up with an hCite tha is liimited, and akward to extend. Every time someone needs to represent a different kind of resource, they'll have to go through some complicated community consensus process just to get their new ttitle, etc. propreties authorized. There really is a better way. Bruce ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
On 7/30/06, Bruce D'Arcus [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I've done enough work on this stuff -- and worked with other developers; people like Chris Putnam on his excellent bibutils converion tools -- to tell you that it's pretty easy to design a a good format that will be easy to use, extend, and process. Nothing blue sky about it. And it won't be hard to convert into and out of BibTeX either (except, of course, where BibTeX's limited data structure gets in the way). Just to illustrate, a simple book encoding may have these properties: author editor translator publilsher title date uid (for isbns and such) The first four reuse hCard. All of those properties (except, I guess, uid, author, and translator) could also include an additional class attribute to be able to capture things like series editors and titles; e.g.: span class=series titleSeries Title/span Is there really any reason why that would be a problem? It's simple, it's easy to convert to BibTeX and other formats, and it's flexible. Bruce ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
Bruce D'Arcus: But if you follow the BibTeX way strictly (where all properties are single values) you will end up with an hCite tha is liimited, and akward to extend. Every time someone needs to represent a different kind of resource, they'll have to go through some complicated community consensus process just to get their new ttitle, etc. propreties authorized. That sounds like an excellent way to discourage trivial accretions - people would only go through the process of extending the spec if they really, really needed it. This means you can start with something relatively simple and easy to get consensus on, and work from there. What's the down-side again? -- dhd even though I know what a 'one time pad' is, it still sounds like a feminine hygiene product. ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
On Sun, 30 Jul 2006, Bruce D'Arcus wrote: The thing you have to recognize in designing a good, extensible, format is that biblioigraphic data is fundmentally relational. It makes sense to hide that complexity where you can, but there are some places where I think it's really bad pratice to do so. Title is an example. I see no reason why we couldn't implement relational characteristics in the microformat. The general idea is to take a standard and to make it better as it becomes a microformat. In this context, we'd be improving upon the bib format. Bruce ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss -- Fred Stutzman claimID.com 919-260-8508 AIM: chimprawk ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
On Sun, 30 Jul 2006, Bruce D'Arcus wrote: On 7/30/06, Fred Stutzman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Well, of course it isn't the overwhelmingly dominant bibliographic/citation format It's not even close. If you ask 100 people in my field about BibTeX, my guess is at least 90 of them of them won't even know what you're talking about. Of course, a lot of them probbaly manually author their bibliographies (!), but still RIS and Endnote are perhaps even more widely supported formats for personal reference management. Both of those formats are based on a more general three level model. I think this misses the point. At the consumer level, the citation format should be transaprent - they should not know what type of citaiton they are authoring (do most people understand the RefWorks citiation format? No). The key is that many systems - web, desktop and machine-to-machine have adopted this format. It will be much easier for CiteULike, CiteSeer, Connotea etc to implement with what they already have. Of course, we can dream up blue-sky scenarios on how to make a better citation format. I'm sure we can do better. But if we do, we miss the boat and lose the collective value of all the software that would natively support the format. Regardless of the end result, you will need software to convert from legacy formats into and out of hCite. There is no way around that. I've done enough work on this stuff -- and worked with other developers; people like Chris Putnam on his excellent bibutils converion tools -- to tell you that it's pretty easy to design a a good format that will be easy to use, extend, and process. Nothing blue sky about it. And it won't be hard to convert into and out of BibTeX either (except, of course, where BibTeX's limited data structure gets in the way). Indeed, it is easy to design a new standard. It is not easy to get people to adopt that new standard. But if you follow the BibTeX way strictly (where all properties are single values) you will end up with an hCite tha is liimited, and akward to extend. Every time someone needs to represent a different kind of resource, they'll have to go through some complicated community consensus process just to get their new ttitle, etc. propreties authorized. There is no requirement to follow bibtex strictly. It seems very reasonable to start with an existing standard and iterate upon it. There's no reason why we shouldn't be making it better. There really is a better way. Bruce ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss -- Fred Stutzman claimID.com 919-260-8508 AIM: chimprawk ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] Easy book citations
On 7/30/06, Fred Stutzman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sun, 30 Jul 2006, Bruce D'Arcus wrote: The thing you have to recognize in designing a good, extensible, format is that biblioigraphic data is fundmentally relational. It makes sense to hide that complexity where you can, but there are some places where I think it's really bad pratice to do so. Title is an example. I see no reason why we couldn't implement relational characteristics in the microformat. The general idea is to take a standard and to make it better as it becomes a microformat. In this context, we'd be improving upon the bib format. OK, cool. That's all I've been saying. Bruce ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
