First, thanks to those of you that attended the call. I've kind of been
slammed this term.
Second, can we step back a bit and talk high-level vision? So, for example
...
Frank, from a user perspective, what sorts of scenarios would your proposal
enable?
Make it much easier for style editors to manage style additions and
changes? So much so that it would open up style editing to a much wider
range of users?
Something else?
Bruce
On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 6:07 AM, Frank Bennett <[email protected]>wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 4:58 PM, Sebastian Karcher
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > last Thursday, Rintze, Frank, and I had a conference call with Alex
> > Garnett and Juan Pablo Alperin of the Public Knowledge Project
> > http://pkp.sfu.ca .
> > We wanted to explore if (and if so how) CSL could find an
> > institutional host at the PKP and what that would entail. Generally
> > the conversation was very positive, the PKP folks know CSL and
> > actually have started using it in one of their projects. They seemed
> > quite positive about the general prospect of providing a home to CSL.
> > They don't have much in terms of developer time to offer, but said
> > that short term some advice and time for grant writing would be
> > possible. They said they would want to be included in some way in the
> > CSL decision-making process, though more in terms of knowing what's
> > going on than to influence decisions (we did describe said process as
> > open and consensus-based, which they seemed fine with). As for grants,
> > as other have said, they said that it's basically impossible to get
> > grants to cover day-to-day operations. Grant institutions want to fund
> > something specific and new, so we'd have to think about that. Rintze
> > and I came up with three areas on the spot:
> > 1. Specifications - while the syntax is well specified, all the little
> > things like eliminating double spaces/punctuation etc. that the
> > processors do (or not) isn't. It should be
> > 2. Legal CSL - incorporating Frank's modification for legal support
> > 3. Other CSL 1.1/2.0 developments including field updates, potential
> > multilingual improvements etc.
> > Perhaps the biggest concern in all of this is that Rintze and I don't
> > see how this is going to reduce our work (which, after all, was one of
> > the original reasons we started talking about this).
>
> That's a big one.
>
> I had an idea today, though, that might catch both objectives. Here's
> the pitch. I think it's as original as casting the CSL editor. See
> what you think about the idea, though.
>
> ***
>
> CSL is a carefully designed language. The potential for CSL to become
> a de facto standard for defining and automating document referencing
> formats has been proven through performance: several implementations
> of the language are running in the wild, and user-contributed styles
> have brought the CSL Style Repository to 800+ styles covering 4000+
> journals. Major projects, including Mendeley, Papers and Zotero rely
> upon the language to serve a large user community, many working in
> research or at the PhD level.
>
> In the community's drive to satisfy user needs, the focus has been on
> individual styles. This has spread attention across an expanding
> codebase, slowing efforts to refine and improve styles across the
> archive as a whole.
>
> This challenge can be addressed by drawing upon a latent potential for
> modularity in CSL that has not heretofore played a part in style
> maintenance and distribution. At the most basic level, CSL cleanly
> separates four elements of style design:
>
> * Citation formats
> * Citation format parameters
> * Bibliography formats
> * Bibliography format parameters
>
> Although each style in the CSL Style Repository is currently stored as
> an atomic unit, each is composed of these four elements, and they can
> easily be separated and remixed, resulting in a smaller base of code,
> higher quality in many styles, and potential for more rapid coverage
> of remaining publisher and university styles. There is deeper
> potential for modularity in CSL (through a shared macro library).
> Implementing this simple modular break-out in the current repository
> infrastructure will make it possible to explore those avenues in
> future.
>
> Moving to a modular archive design would require the following:
>
> * Style-level test suites to confirm current style behaviour;
> * Tools for breaking out the current code base:
> - Separating current styles into citation-format and
> bibliography-format elements for separate validation;
> - Extracting and storing bibliography and citation format IDs and
> parameters on a per-style basis.
> * Tools for exploring commonalities between citation and
> bibliography formats, and merging IDs;
> * A middle layer for recombining styles from modular code and
> testing the result.
>
> For simplicity, this back-office functionality should be masked from
> users and style designers, who understand CSL styles (either when
> using the CSL editor, or when directly editing style XML) as
> integrated units. Accordingly, archive modularisation should be
> accompanied by a maintenance layer performing two functions:
>
> * Automated pre-flight checks for schema validity and correct and
> complete style metadata;
> * Arbitration with the modular repo back-end, with heuristic
> identification and merger of citation and bibliography formats; and
> * User-facing and maintainer-facing UI to drive these facilities.
>
> ***
>
> Frank
>
>
> >
> > I'll send a separate e-mail tomorrow with a brief proposal on the
> > framework for a PKP-CSL partnership, but wanted to get this out there
> > for both information and discussion.
> > Best,
> > Sebastian
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Sebastian Karcher
> > Ph.D. Candidate
> > Department of Political Science
> > Northwestern University
> >
> >
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