RE: [Axiom-developer] [GeneralDiscussion] Plone Bibliography

[Page, Bill]

On Wednesday, April 12, 2006 11:22 PM Bob McElrath wrote:
> ..
> Bill Page wrote:
> > Hmmm... since we have some direct support for LaTeX on Plone
> > (via ZWiki) then I suppose it might make sense to make this
> > more transparent, extracting citations from the Plone
> > bibliography database and running bibtex all automatically...
> > :) By-golly it's easy to get overly ambitious!
> 
> I don't know if that's overly ambitious, but at least in my
> field we have arXiv.org references such as hep-ph/0509024 which
> would be easy to parse and make a link to the arXiv, as well as
> a footnote containing the authors, title, journal reference etc,
> as would appear in a latex document.

Do you mean online access to arXiv.org using "hep-ph/0509024" as
a search key to retrieve and parse the citation info... I think
that is ambitious. Are there any web tools for arXiv that make
this easier?

> 
> I want to make it as easy as possible for people to add a
> \cite{blah}.

I think the problem is not the \cite but rather the 'blah' ...
'blah' must be a simple, useful and unique identifier of a
published document. That is not easy in general.

> The bibliography is already there (or at least accessable on
> SPIRES and the arXiv) so all that is needed is for the wiki
> page to recognize the \cite.
> 

Parsing static data like 'hep-ph/0509024' into a clickable url
is easy but extracting and formating citation information is
rather hard to do in general. That's why we have tools like
BiBtex and EndNote, etc.

One thing that I am quite interested in for other reasons is
a project called DSpace:

http://dspace.org

This is an aggressive and rapidly developing project fueled by
HP, and MIT to produce a free open source digital archive. It
is very rapidly be adopted by the university research library
community and I have already set it up a few times for several
of my clients. It is not so hard to setup for personal use.
DSpace already provides integration of a local archive with a
web-wide "handle" server that simplies urls that reference
archive content and make it possible to move the content with
out changing the document handle.

Maybe integrating something like this might be worthwhile...
but beware: This a Java/JSP web application - somewhat different
world that Zope and Python. ;)

Regards,
Bill Page.