[Bibjson-dev] omnidator

Fri Jun 17 14:15:45 UTC 2011

Many thanks William for the intro, and Michael for the quick and encouraging response.
Also glad to meet you.
> I know, use and love bibutils - very happy to collaborate, here!
Excellent! Your experience with bibutils  conversions should be very useful. I have always
wanted to see bibutils or similar supported as a webservice, much as you are providing omnidator.
I did not test omnidator at all yet, but the principle of it is great. I very much hope that the
community around BibJSON is able to support a similar tool for mapping to/from BibJSON.
I am completely neutral about what is used as the hub format, as long as it is well supported,
and I can get JSON in and out.

Michael, let me encourage you to join the bibjson-dev list
http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/bibjson-dev
to participate further in our exchanges about bibjson. We are in the process of reformulating the
bibjson spec http://www.bibkn.org/bibjson/index.html both so BibJSON can serve as the
format over which BibServer display software can run, and to provide a lingua franca for bibliographic
data exchange compatible with LD notions.

> As far as I understood, Jim simply stated the general fact that if you  
> want to translate from N languages to N languages you would, in the  
> naive case, need N^2-N converters, whereas applying the Lingua Franca  
> pattern [1] one can cut it down to 2N. This is true for bibutils and  
> as well for omnidator. Nothing new here and no criticism implied ;)

Indeed. This was not even my text. I just cut/pasted from the bibutils site.
>
> Jim said:
> > ] 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.
>
> ... and William rightly pointed out:
> > 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.
> Indeed. JSON-LD [2] alignment would be desirable if this doesn't break  
> your downstream compatibility. 

Very much the response I was hoping for. We should definitely align bibjson with json-ld 
and I am relying on those familiar with LD to ensure that.
Mark, please incorporate the above sentences into the BibJSON requirements doc to
keep us on the rails.

> Now, omnidator is nothing more than a  GAE deployment (with a bit of an UI on top) of the Schema.org gateway  
> [3] which happens to leverage the terms defined by Schema.org. Given  that this is not a show-stopper I'd suggest you clone this repo and  
> develop a fork, adapting it to your needs.

This would be excellent.  Mark/Richard, please can you investigate and follow up on this with Michael?

> If I can be of help (re supported input/output formats) please let me  
> know and I'll prioritise them - simply raising an issue on the repo  [3] would help to keep track of it (pls. do mention Schema.org gateway  
> in the issue, as we have quite some sub-projects in it ;)

Fantastic.  Again, Mark/Richard to follow up.

Thanks again Michael for such a positive response! I very much hope you can contribute further to
the bibjson dev.

all the best

--Jim
>
> [1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LinguaFrancaPattern
> [2] http://json-ld.org/
> [3] https://github.com/mhausenblas/schema-org-rdf/tree/master/tools/schema-gateway
>
> --
> Dr. Michael Hausenblas, Research Fellow
> LiDRC - Linked Data Research Centre
> DERI - Digital Enterprise Research Institute
> NUIG - National University of Ireland, Galway
> Ireland, Europe
> Tel. +353 91 495730
> http://linkeddata.deri.ie/
> http://sw-app.org/about.html
----------------------------------------------
Jim Pitman
Director, Bibliographic Knowledge Network Project
http://www.bibkn.org/

Professor of Statistics and Mathematics
University of California
367 Evans Hall # 3860
Berkeley, CA 94720-3860

ph: 510-642-9970  fax: 510-642-7892
e-mail: pitman at stat.berkeley.edu
URL: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/users/pitman