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

Fri Feb 24 17:04:09 UTC 2012

Hi Jakob, thanks a lot for your responses.

On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 1:35 PM, Jakob Voss <jakob.voss at gbv.de> wrote:
> 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

Yes, working on CSL at the moment actually!

> 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.

Agreed - this is what I was thinking too - to have "name" and also
"firstname", "lastname" keys where possible, and still also
"alternate" if someone wishes to provide them.

> 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

Yes, I am hoping this will work well (should be in the next version in
March - need to make a bit of a guess when "firstname" and "lastname"
are not provided - probably split on first comma if there is one,
otherwise split on last space.

Thanks again - it is great to get feedback!

Mark