[openbiblio-dev] BibJSON and multiple languages

Wed Mar 7 12:00:46 UTC 2012

Apologies in advance if this has been covered before.

The BibJSON spec, like most bibliographic data formats assumes that the publication is in one language. I often come across articles in multiple languages (e.g., the article, abstract, and body of the text is in Portuguese, but an English title and abstract are also provided). Note that this differs from a complete translation of the article (which can be treated as a separate thing).

The ability to easily add metadata elements in different languages to supplement to main language would be handy, especially when indexing. For example, I'm building a database with numerous articles in Chinese. It would be useful to provide the metadata in both Chinese and English. But I might not be providing all the metadata, it may be just the title, authors and abstract that need to be represented more than once. At the same time, I'd like to avoid having complicating things. For example, I don't want to have to specify the language if there's only one.

Has anybody got a similar problem. Obviously I could hack something that meets my needs, but something more general might be useful.

Regards

Rod

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Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

Email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
Tel: +44 141 330 4778
Fax: +44 141 330 2792
AIM: rodpage1962 at aim.com
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Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html

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