[Bibjson-dev] BibJSON Goals

[Mark MacGillivray]

On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 5:24 PM, Jim Pitman <pitman at stat.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Mark MacGillivray <mark at cottagelabs.com> wrote:
>
>> Couple of things to point out:
>>
>> when converting from BibJSON -> BibTex -> BibJSON as Peter mentioned,
>> you would not actually get vaild BibTex out - e.g. there would be
>> things in there that are not BibTex. Because we are embedding metadata
>> in the first object of the list, and that metadata will include things
>> we introduce in BibJSON such as "namespaces", it would not strictly be
>> BibTex.
>
> There is no problem puttine metadata into BibTeX. You just stuff it in a comment
> field. There is metadata in the top entry of my bibserver.bib
>
> http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~pitman/bibsever.bib
>
> which generates the title and other information displayed in
>
> http://bibserver.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/bibs7?source=http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/users/pitman/bibserver.bib
>
> The role of BibJSON in this context is to provide an intermediate format  between the BibTeX and the BibServer
> so that BibServer can run over any modest sized and well structured biblio dataset.
>
>> We could drop this metadata in a conversion to BibTex,
>> but of course then we could not convert back into BibJSON without losing content.
>
> NO!  Just put the metadata it in a comment field, or otherwise hide it, without loss.
> See e.g.  http://www.netlib.org/bibnet/authors/b/
> and similar directories for a large number of personal biblios in BibTeX with high quality metadata
> hidden in a BibTeX entry behind tex comments %%%.
> There is all kinds of bad practice like this. We need to set a good practice with BibJSON, and provide a
> few simple ways like what I did and what Nelson Beebe has done to embed metadata in BibTeX files.
> It should BTW be a good and simple exercise for us to convert all of Beebe's netlib to BibJSON, and to provide
> BibServer functionality over each bib in his collection, as well as a BibServer index of the whole collection
> obained by pulling all the metadata files and making them into a new collection.  This is the kind of use case
> we must accomodate with BibJSON/BibServer.

OK, this is fine as long as you can be the person to make sure we put
it in the right place in BibTex! You know more about BibTex than the
rest of us. As long as I can get the necessary metadata in and out of
BibJSON, then great.