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

Fri Feb 24 17:35:06 UTC 2012

On 2/24/12 9:04 AM, Mark MacGillivray wrote:

Excellent analysis by Jakob on names. This is an often-garbled area of 
metadata.

>
> 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.

Yes, although remember that "alternate" may also need "first" "last" and 
a simple string. Basically, "alternate" is another type of name, worthy 
of structuring.

That said, it may be best to leave alternates for a name record, rather 
than putting them in the bibliographic record. The subject of the 
alternate name is the person, not the bibliographic data, and it's not 
clear to me that many people would include such alternates in citation 
data, especially since they would need to be repeated in each citation.

I know that bibjson isn't going so far as to create separate records for 
persons, but as soon as you start adding more person information that 
becomes a logical step. Most of the "scholarly citation" systems that 
I'm aware of do have a separate person information record, then link 
from the person record to the citation record. This allows one to create 
an extensive personal profile, with CVs and awards and grants, etc.

Essentially, the question becomes: how far to go down this road within 
the citation metadata?

Also, I notice that there is an "id:" element in the person name area. I 
presume that this could be used for ORCID or researcherID, etc. Will the 
type of ID be clear from the text? I don't know how people generally use 
these, and if they are full URNs or URIs or not.

kc

>
>
>> 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
>
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Karen Coyle
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