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

[Jim Pitman]

Karen Coyle <kcoyle at kcoyle.net> wrote:

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

> > 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. 

Yes! This is definitely where they belong. All the record needs to do is provide the identifier for hooking to the name 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.

Right. Most citation data comes without name records. But these can be created by further processing. I have done a lot of that sort of work.

> I know that bibjson isn't going so far as to create separate records for 
> persons, 

On the contrary, BibJSON has had capability to provide records for people and
organizations right from the beginning, simply by borrowing from FOAF/BIBO/...
namespaces as needed. I have extensive BibJSON stores of people records in
mathematics, probably a million or so, which need deduplication work.

> 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.

Yes. This is an expected use of BibJSON/BibServer.  There are several academic
initiatives in this direction which we should aim to connect to: Open Scholar (collaboration agreed in principle) Vivo (not approached recently: they are wary about sharing data)

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

All the way!

> 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.

Brings us to the basic issue of regularizing ids for whatever entities:
See e.g. https://gist.github.com/1884546 and 
the recent " Counting identifiers in Editions" thread beneath
http://www.mail-archive.com/ol-tech@archive.org/

I think this needs a separate discussion and some collab doc space to develop
best practices for ids in BibJSON. I'd be glad to start a Google Doc on
this. Any volunteers to work on it?

--Jim

----------------------------------------------
Jim Pitman
Professor of Statistics and Mathematics
University of California
367 Evans Hall # 3860
Berkeley, CA 94720-3860

ph: 510-642-9970  fax: 510-642-7892
e-mail: pitman at stat.berkeley.edu
URL: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/users/pitman