Re: [xbiblio-devel] Embedded CSL fields in Mendeley Word & OO documents

[Bruce D'A. <bd...@gm...>]

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 1:46 PM, Simon Kornblith <si...@si...> wrote:

...

>> JSON is very easy for us to deal with as it can be passed straight to
>> citeproc, and adding support for citeproc features which Mendeley doesn't
>> currently support is easy. Is there a compelling reason to switch to RDF?
>
> CSL JSON is definitely simpler to code, but Bibliontology RDF is more versatile in terms of field support and extensibility. My opinion on this is not very strong.

And what did you have in mind in terms of a JSON representation of
BIBO? Using a generic RDF-as-JSON, which will be pretty verbose, or
something more idiomatic to JSON?

Pulling back, I've been gravitating towards thinking of two kinds of
representation that ought to be able to be more-or-less round-tripped:

1) a CSL JSON which is very close to the CSL model, and so easy to
process from that standpoint
2) a richer, more extensible, more rigorous and remixable, BIBO RDF

The second has an additional benefit, which is that it can be
serialized in different ways, including as RDFa embedded in HTML
output, which is a medium term goal I'd like to push on: the idea that
the output CSL implementations produce is not just dumb text, but can
also be extracted as structured data.

It can also be embedded as RDF/XML in ODF documents in standard ways
consistent with that spec, and so is accessible to the OOo/LO metadata
API (though MS Office has no such thing, so that leaves the question
of how to deal with that).

But there's no doubt that all of this has some additional costs.

There's also no denying that dumping json in fields is a bit of an
abuse of the formats.

In any case, I don't have a strong opinion either; my main goal is
something that "just works."

Bruce