[openbiblio-dev] Best practice for name format in BibJSON

Fri Feb 24 13:35:22 UTC 2012

Hi,

I had a look at http://bibjson.org/ and agree that it has some benefits 
compared to BibTeX and RDF-based formats - there won't be one and only 
format anyway, but different forms for different use cases.

Apart from the missing mapping to Citation Style Language JSON [1] I 
only found the following issue problematic: there is no best practice 
guideline how to format object names. Some example snippets from 
http://bibjson.org/:

"author":[
         {"name": "Richard Jones"},
         {"name": "Mark MacGillivray"},

"journal":{
     "name": "A really great journal",

"author":[ { "name": "MacGillivray, Mark" },

"author": [ {
             "name": "Erdös, Paul",
             "alternate": ["Paul Erdos"],
             "firstname": "Paul",
             "lastname": "Erdös",

I would not recommed the form "surname, given" in "name" elements. In 
general a "name" element should not be expected to have internal 
structure. If you distinguish given and surname, you can put them in 
their own fields. Otherwise clients need additional parsing and 
splitting of names. So instead of

{"name": "MacGillivray, Mark"}

say

{"firstname": "Mark", "lastname": "MacGillivray"}

or provide both

{"firstname": "Mark", "lastname": "MacGillivray",
  "name": "Mark MacGillivray" }

So the "name" element is always the natural form.

You can then map BibJSON to Citation Style Language JSON:

firstname <=> given
lastname <=> family
name <=> literal

[1] See http://gsl-nagoya-u.net/http/pub/citeproc-doc.html#data-input

-- 
Jakob Voß <jakob.voss at gbv.de>, skype: nichtich
Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) / Common Library Network
Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1, 37073 Göttingen, Germany
+49 (0)551 39-10242, http://www.gbv.de