[openbiblio-dev] BibSoup in AnimalGarden

Mon Dec 19 21:49:42 UTC 2011

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

> > There are many tools for editing BibTeX or logical equivalent, which is
> > largely adequate as a
> > BibJSON substrate. e.g. Zotero, Mendeley, BibSonomy, BibDesk, JabRef, ...
> > Any of these could be used to edit a collection and then publish it to
> > BibSoup. We should
> > as soon as possible support proper between the native SQLite files used by
> > Zotero and Mendeley and BibJSON.

> Do these require the user to know BibTeX?  
No

> Or do they have schema-driven GUIs? 
Yes.

> If the latter then we can presumably have an import on the server.
It is the latter, and such an import is what I am advocating. Zotero and Mendeley do not make it
easy to get at their sQLite, or to otherwise publicly export data, but we should find ways to do this.
It would help to have some Zotero and Mendeley users willing to experiment. An issue is that
a typical academic user usually does not want to expose all of their local biblio data, e.g. what they
are reading as part of their current research, so it is essential to find a way of publicly exporting suitably 
tagged parts of the dataset kept in an app like  Z or M, and make it easy for users to manage privacy of their
biblio data collections. Hopefully, we can facilitate this by encouraging present biblio maintenance
systems to provide public BibJSON exports. We are a long way from being able to offer a personal biblio collection 
app comparable to  M or Z, and I think we should avoid competing in that space, rather aim to 
dominate the public biblio space by integration of data from whatever private maintenance platform.

--Jim

----------------------------------------------
Jim Pitman
Professor of Statistics and Mathematics
University of California
367 Evans Hall # 3860
Berkeley, CA 94720-3860

ph: 510-642-9970  fax: 510-642-7892
e-mail: pitman at stat.berkeley.edu
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