[okfn-discuss] Tools for collaboratively developing online bibliographic indexes

[Finn Aarup Nielsen]

On Mon, 30 Nov 2009, Jonathan Gray wrote:

> I currently have several ideas for projects for which I want to create
> large, collaboratively maintained online bibliographies (or
> bibliographic indexes/databases)...
>
> I wonder if anyone has any ideas for any (open source) tools which
> might be good for this? Or where I could ask?

Mendeley is an online bibliography database where bibliographies from 
individual users can be shared. I am not all too family with it, but I 
think it would be difficult/impossible to organize, e.g., by country of 
author.

I would suggest Semantic MediaWiki. There you can define you own fields, 
e.g., language and 'primary' or 'secondary' matrial. It will be easy to 
annotate the works - you just do that in the normal wiki text.

I believe the developer of Markus Krötzsch has his publication ordered 
with Semantic MediaWiki.

I am using a poor man's version of semantic-like MediaWiki - without the 
Semantics MediaWiki extension - to organize and annotate bibliographic 
information from neuroscience, see, e.g.,

http://neuro.imm.dtu.dk/wiki/Right_temporoparietal_cortex_activation_during_visuo-proprioceptive_conflict

By extracting the annotated/structured content and putting it into a 
standard database I can do off-wiki queries.

With other MediaWiki extensions it will probably not be that difficult to 
do time line, see the easyTimeline for example.

/Finn

> A few notes on the kind of thing I am looking for:
>  * There are quite a few static HTML bibliographies out there, but
> I'd like to be able to do basic queries on my bibliographies, rather
> than just viewing them as a list. E.g. organise by country of author,
> by language of work, order works chronologically, order according to
> whether 'primary' or 'secondary' material (this will probably be a
> non-standard field!), and so on.
>  * Not limited to books, but to articles, primary sources
> (manuscripts), audiovisual material - as well as pointing to online
> sources (especially public domain texts).
>  * Ability to annotate bibliography (comments on works)...
>  * Preferably using some kind of standard format for bibliographic
> metadata - and (in an ideal world) flexibility to output records in
> different formats (MLA, Harvard...)
>  * Preferably I'd like to have some control over where these are
> hosted (i.e. not using a proprietary/third party service).
>  * In the short term this would be in English, and would contain
> works from multiple languages, but over time support for being able to
> translate material into multiple languages would be valuable.
>  * Also (again in an ideal world!) I'd like to be able to pull out
> dates associated with works and authors - which could be displayed on
> a timeline (by country, say).
>
> Any/all tips would be greatly appreciated!


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          Finn Aarup Nielsen, DTU Informatics, Denmark
  Lundbeck Foundation Center for Integrated Molecular Brain Imaging
    http://www.imm.dtu.dk/~fn/      http://nru.dk/staff/fnielsen/
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