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

Wed Oct 19 21:56:04 UTC 2011

On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 12:22 AM, Thad Guidry <thadguidry at gmail.com> wrote:

> Tom, would you be kind enough to review their
> github https://github.com/okfn/bibserver/tree/master/bibserver/parsers and
> let everyone know the effort there ?

It's less than 300 lines of Python which implements a hand written
parser (rather than using parser/lexer generator), so it wouldn't be a
lot of work to write the moral equivalent in Java, but since parsers
tend to be fiddlie it'd probably be less trouble to start with a
proven Java parser as a base.  It also contains some stuff like name
piece guessing and Tex->Unicode conversion which we might want to
defer to the post-import phase (although that probably deserves
discussion).

For Java starting points, the bibtex2rdf project looks the most
promising right now with the MIT Simile/Babel project's converter as a
backup.

>(  Btw Tom, I might put a bounty on
> this again, not for sure however, since I do not directly need it, just
> helping scientist friends ;) and it looks like OKFN would like to see it
> happen as well ! )

Cash is good. :-)  If someone wanted to pay for this, I'd certainly be
happy to knock something together and iterate on it with them or their
designated users.  I just finished porting my Open Document Format
(ODF) Spreadsheet importer and exporter to Refine's new importer
architecture, so it's all still fresh in my mind.

Tom