[open-bibliography] Google Refine contributor wanting to help this community

Sat Oct 15 17:43:12 UTC 2011

On Sat, Oct 15, 2011 at 2:15 AM, Thad Guidry <thadguidry at gmail.com> wrote:

> I brought up the idea to the team about getting a BibTex BIbJSON
> importer/exporter, since we already support JSON, XML, RDF, and even MARC
> already.

People who are interested in this feature should add their support ("star"):
http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/issues/detail?id=195

> What I am missing is a BibTex parser, or better yet, a generic BibTex to
> JSON converter in Java source.  Hence this email to your community and
> offering and asking for assistance.

That issue includes the results of my research to date on Java-based
BibTex parsers.  If anyone knows of others, or has feedback on
advantages/disadvantages of any of the ones listed, please add an
update there.

> One of the bonuses of this endeavor is to allow authors or publishers or
> anyone to upload their bib metadata to Freebase.com, if they want, entirely
> up to them.

It's not quite as simple as "upload" since BibTex is all just strings.
 It doesn't care whether two authors named "John Smith" are the same
or not, because all it's going to do with the info is typeset it.
Freebase (and other semantic databases), on the other hand, care very
much.

Using Google Refine with an external reconciliation service like
Freebase or the DERI RDF extension can provide a valuable bridge to
upgrading a 20th century (or earlier) bibliography with strong
identifiers, but it'll require a fair amount of work.  It's work that
will make the bibliography that much more valuable though.

Tom