[openbiblio-dev] BibJSON and multiple languages

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 8:02 AM, Roderic Page <r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk> wrote:

>
> As ever, there seems to be a balancing act between keeping things simple
> (at the risk of storing up future problems) and making things general (at
> the risk of drowning users in complexity they rarely need).
>
>
> Yes,
We are very fortunate to have Mark at the centre of this as someone who
both understands the discipline and can rapidly introduce new
functionality. There is always a huge danger of over-reaching in
specifications with the result that systems are unimplementable or
incomprehensible or both. I have been involved in much of the XML effort
and am always striving to repeat the simplicity of SAX, and avoid things
like the appalling XSD Schema.

I've seen the problems of allowing mutliple ways of representing pieces of
information and allowing either strings or objects can be a problem.
Features are often simple to request and difficult to implement. In this
our touchstone must be "running code". If Mark cannot prioritise something
within the current program then it may have to wait.

At this stage an important aspect is getting running instances of
bibliography (e.g. the malaria resource) and finding out what people value.
But we also have to be prepared to turn down features. BibJSON is not a
universal solution able to do anything. It's a powerful, flexible, simple
approach which will have known limitations.

P.

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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