[Bibjson-dev] BibJSON Goals

Thu Jun 2 15:53:49 UTC 2011

Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> Sam tells me there is a useful BibXML functionality in Word2007. It's not
> (yet?) very popular. An attraction is that there is a single central file
> for a collectiosn of documents. Tipping this into a converter would creat a lot of community Bibsoup.

Who is Sam?  Yes, writing BibXML -> BibJSON converters for various forms of BibXML would be very useful.
In this connection, see also 

http://www.scripps.edu/~cdputnam/software/bibutils/

The bibutils program set interconverts between various bibliography formats using a common MODS-format XML intermediate. For example, one can convert RIS-format files to Bibtex by doing two transformations: RIS->MODS->Bibtex. By using a common intermediate for N formats, only 2N programs are required and not NÂ²-N. These programs operate on the command line and are styled after standard UNIX-like filters.

Unfortunately this is a solo developer effort (page last updated in 2008) but the software is GPL.
Would be worth reviewing the quality of these converters, and ease of MODS-XML to BibJSON conversion.
If the existing converters are good, and we can handle BibJSON embedding of MODS-XML, this could be useful.
But the existing converters have to adopted and maintained by the BibJSON communit for this to be successful I think.

> > * web service (could be a useful way of growing the community)
> >
> Sam thinks this is straightforward using JQuery and very easily redistributable.

Good. Generally BibServer can be offered as a pwerful webservice to entice users to expose their bibs in forms that
BibServer can understand, e.g. BibTeX and then the data is converted into BibJSON as a byproduct.
More on BibTeX/BibJSON in following message.

--Jim