[openbiblio-dev] BibJSON spec

Thu Feb 23 01:20:56 UTC 2012

Patrick Golden <ptgolden at berkeley.edu> wrote:

> I'm working on writing an export function for Zotero to output items to 
> BibJSON. 

Excellent! That will be great to have.

As a guide I'm using the description at http://bibjson.org/.
> Here's an initial question. 

Best place for such questions is the open biblio dev list, copied here,
which I encourage you to subscribe to.

That page says:
>
> > As mentioned in the overview, when something is simple it can just be 
> > a string pointed at by a suitable key; but otherwise, it needs to be 
> > an object. So which things are objects?
> >
> >   * author is a list of objects
> >   * editor is a list of objects
> >   * license is a list of objects
> >   * identifier is a list of objects
> >   * link is a list of objects
> >   * journal is an object
> >
> These keys are arrays of objects according to the BibJSON standard, but 
> can other keys be as well? If the "author" and "editor" fields contain 
> lists of objects representing people, can the same be done for 
> "recipient" or "translator" or "illustrator", etc.?

I think they should be. Others I have encountered are "originator", "creator".I am not clear however on 
the process by which it is decided which keys have this feature and  which do not, nor on where the
definitive list of such keys (if there is one) can be expected to be found. 
Another issue is how consistent we should aim to be on what keys are required/expected once inside an 
object of this kind. I think it is reasonable to insist on some required fields, and to encourage use
of some optional ones, in the style of bibtex, and make this part of the BibJSON spec to try to reduce
potential proliferation of field names.

Mark, could you please comment?

Its really great Patrick that you are following up on this. Many thanks for your interest!

--Jim

----------------------------------------------
Jim Pitman
Professor of Statistics and Mathematics
University of California
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