[Bibjson-dev] omnidator

Thu Jun 16 20:30:45 UTC 2011

Hi Jim,

The author of omnidator is a friend and collaborator, Michael
Hausenblas, copied here.

I don't see where you get N^2-N (maybe unicode problems, that's how I
read N?-N, apologies if I've misunderstood), omnidator from what I can
tell uses RDF as an internal representation like the bibutils use
MODS.  So actually the way it works, I think, more or less, there are
N serialisers and N deserialisers, so 2N just like bibutils - but it
isn't limited to bibliographic data.

I share your preference for simple unix-style pipes with simple
programs over web interfaces in general, and you can get that just by
installing the different necessary I/O plugins and then using rdfpipe.

An interesting extension to this for bibliographic data (as well as
other specific domains) would be to use FuXi (which also can behave as
a simple command line filter) that could take resources expressed
using one vocabulary and, given some domain-specific rules, translate
them to some other vocabulary. This way you could go between
book-as-expressed-in-schema.org to book-as-expressed-in-bibo or
book-as-expressed-in-bibtex-rdf.

To the extent that bibjson can be aligned with json-ld using a
suitable vocabulary a lot of this can come along for free. To
the extent that we need or want bibtex/mods/marc21/etc i/o it is
then just as simple as writing the necessary parsers/serialisers,
and we could just use omnidator or a only slightly modified 
variant.

Cheers,
-w

* [2011-06-16 09:17:30 -0700] Jim Pitman <pitman at stat.Berkeley.EDU> écrit:

] http://omnidator.appspot.com/
] 
] omnidator takes whatever kind of data format that uses Schema.org terms and turns it into any other kind of data format.
] 
] Compare with 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 N²-N. These programs operate on the command line and are styled after standard UNIX-like filters.
] 
] We need a strategy/architecture for managing conversions to/from BibJSON, presumably a webservice like omnidator, and some community development to support this over time.
] Thoughts about how to achieve this?
] 
] --Jim
] 
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-- 
William Waites                <mailto:ww at styx.org>
http://river.styx.org/ww/        <sip:ww at styx.org>
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