On Aug 23, 2004, at 2:49 PM, Wendell Piez wrote:
This architecture could certainly be rearranged to have OpenOffice be
your ultimate target. (While I'm a fan of OpenOffice, however, I don't
find its own XML to be robust and descriptive enough to be the
mediating core format here, however -- though I suppose that could be
changed, which is a big reason I like OpenOffice.)
I'm working on a proposal right now with an engineer at Sun that would
remove all of the existing OOo bib code and replace it with a robust
namespaced citation schema. The citations would then just point to an
external MODS file embedded in the file wrapper (OOo files are zipped
archives).
In case you're curious, a citation would then look something like this:
<citation>
<citation-source>
<biblioref linkend="doe99a">
<detail units="pages" begin="23" end="24"/>
</biblioref>
<citation-source>
<citation-body>
[... whatever rendered citation ...]
<citation-body>
</citation>
In other words, at the level of the XML, the OpenOffice solution would
look a lot the DocBook stuff I'm working with now, with the only
difference that it has to hold presentation display code as well.
When inserting citations, they would likely be pre-rendered (so as to
not force a constant recycling of the xslt process). If a user changes
styles, the xslt is run on the MODS document, and the citation-body
content is regenerated.
How's that?
It will be quite a technical and marketing achievement to come up with
a solution that is so comprehensive, serviceable and user-friendly
that it can compete with the widespread *belief* that Word and Endnote
are up to the job already
I used to be a beta tester for Endnote. Don't even get me started on
that company. As for their product, it won't be hard to best it so
long as we get some programmers to implement the already good ideas we
have.
In fact, I just heard from a guy that's going to put a team of CS
students to work on a semester long project that could serve as the
core of this, using the Berkley DB XML for storage, and a unified
local/remote query layer built on SRW, which is the library world's web
services protocol.
So imagine an application built on open XML and XSLT, using a rich
metadata standard, and built from the ground up to query and ingest
remote resources as easily as it does local records (the Library of
Congress catalog in fact serves MODS records). Many scholars would
ditch Word for OpenOffice in a heartbeat if they had a decent
bibliographic tool, which is the goal of this work.
Is the glass starting to fill? ;-)
Bruce