[openbiblio-dev] BibSoup in AnimalGarden

Mon Dec 19 23:00:02 UTC 2011

Karen Coyle <kcoyle at kcoyle.net> wrote:

> BNB will only be books. I've seen that CrossRef [1] and DataCite [2]  
> provide bibliographic data based on DOIs. Any chance of using those?

CrossRef have a little publicized public API which returns RDF Turtle. I dont find
its URL quickly now, but I have code which maps this to BibJSON pretty well for all the returns I have tried.
It may be easier to use the new CrossRef experimental service [3] which returns multiple formats including
a form of JSON which appears to be very easily mapped to BibJSON. It would be nice to engage CrossRef and persuade 
them to support BibJSON. Volunteers for such an initiative and perhaps an IsItOpenData  query to CrossRef?
It is not clear exactly what would be the IP status of data obtained in any quantity from CrossRef.
It is also not clear that it benefits open bibliography to ask further.

Note that CrossRef data is typically inferior to what can be obtained by scraping publisher pages,
as available e.g.  via the BibSonomy scraper API [4].  

DataCite is a very interesting service but currently relevant only for the very small fraction of 
academic articles which explicitly cite data sources.

[1]  http://www.crossref.org/CrossTech/2011/04/content_negotiation_for_crossr.html
[2] http://data.datacite.org/
[3]  http://scraper.bibsonomy.org/
[4] http://www.crossref.org/CrossTech/2011/11/turning_dois_into_formatted_ci.html

--Jim

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Jim Pitman
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