[open-bibliography] (Final?) discussion of the openbiblio principles

Sat Jan 8 21:28:45 UTC 2011

Quoting Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk>:

> By contrast the citations are subjective and potentially ambiguous or
> "wrong". In an ideal world the bibliographic data are nodes in a graph and
> the citations are (annotated) edges. In practice many citations point to
> non-existent or ambiguous nodes  - and this is in some cases irresolvable.
> An article can be created (and many are) without citations. An article must
> have a single set of bibliographic data.

Isn't there also the issue that citations are considered part of the  
text of an article? In that sense, they are included in the  
copyrightable portion. However, if a third party reads the article and  
makes the connections between citer and citee, then this may be a  
separate declaration.

It is an unfortunate fact that many citations are "literary" rather  
than "factual" and Peter is right that a whole lot of citations don't  
connect up to anything in the bibliographic world. One of my dreams is  
that citations would be derived from bibliographic data (rather than  
being composed by authors) and would therefore contain the actual  
connections needed to be able to declare them as truly "bibliographic  
DATA". The capability for this almost exists in software like EndNote  
and Zotero, where citations are merely displays from actual data.  
Keeping these connections as linked data would be ideal.

kc

-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet