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

Fri Feb 24 19:26:06 UTC 2012

On the subject of names, rather than "firstname" and "lastname", it would
be better to use "given" and "family", I think.

The W3C has a nice page on "Personal names around the world", which every
developer should at least skim over once, I'd suggest:
http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names

Chris Maloney

On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 8:35 AM, 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
> 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<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
>
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