[open-bibliography] Extra RDF datatypes

Sat Nov 20 19:13:21 UTC 2010

Christopher Gutteridge <cjg at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:

> Something that's been an ongoing issue for us in expressing bibliographic data in RDF, often we have fragments of text which contain 
> markup mixed with ones that don't. HTML & LaTeX fragments being the most 
> common.
>
> http://purl.org/xtypes/
>
> defines new datatypes to express this, eg.
>
> <dc:description rdf:datatype='http://purl.org/Fragment-HTML'>Hello 
> <b>World</b></dc:description>
> <dc:description rdf:datatype='http://purl.org/Fragment-PlainText'>Hello 
> World</dc:description>
> PlainText explicitly indicates an absence of markup, other than 
> CF,LF,Tab and others which are part of the character set.
> I've been waiting years for a solution to this one, so I've given up and done it myself.

Me too. Many thanks for this initiative!
I have the same problem with BibJSON http://www.bibkn.org/bibjson/index.html
and would be glad to coordinate on this. In JSON I've never got much better than
tagging keys with a format indicator e.g.  "title_html",  "title_tex", ...
This is not very JSONish, but it is at least easily encoded in BibTeX which is an advantage.
My concern with an RDF implementation is that it may quickly get very heavy. Note that with any
format indication, there are nuances of meaning which may need to be specificied. e.g. it is useful
to know for display purposes if html is limited to just a few tags, and there are different versions of tex, latex, ...
Having a pointer to a rigorous format description that will allow consumers of the data to process it with
out too much burden of checking format variations would be very useful.

--Jim

----------------------------------------------
Jim Pitman
Director, Bibliographic Knowledge Network Project
http://www.bibkn.org/

Professor of Statistics and Mathematics
University of California
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Berkeley, CA 94720-3860

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e-mail: pitman at stat.berkeley.edu
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