[Bibdesk-develop] Re: [Bibdesk-users] PDF Metadata

[James H. <jho...@sy...>]

[This seemed more relevant to Bibdesk-develop than Bibdesk-users]

On Saturday, June 21, 2003, at 09:32  am, Michael McCracken wrote:

> On Friday, June 13, 2003, at 06:51  AM, James Howison wrote:
>
>> Ah I promised three so here is number two ;)
>>
>> It would be cool if one could drop a pdf oonto bibdesk and have it 
>> pull the metadata from the metadata fields of the pdf - in a manner 
>> akin to the ID3 tag ini mp3s.
>>
> Whoa, yeah! ID3 tags for papers, excellent idea! I want to live in 
> that world.
>
>> I've done a little poking around but didn't see anything that would 
>> make this immediately possible - is there an effort to standardize 
>> citation metadata so that it 'rides' along with the pdf?
>
> If there is, I don't know about it. There is some effort to unify XML 
> flavors of citation data, but not for any connection with PDF that I 
> know of. I'd love to hear about one if anyone finds one.

Right - it seems that maybe the right way to do this is through XMP - 
which is a W3C standard (part of the RDF group) that Adobe is making 
open source ...

http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/main.html

There is an SDK available.  I'm not sure if OpenOffice et al is going 
to use this format but it seems kosher enough.

It is 'eXtensible' so maybe we just create a field for a bibtex entry 
and adapt bibdesk to read that when the file id drag and dropped.

I'll look again tonight.  I ran this past the mailing list of faculty 
at a Library school and got lotts of responses that said - yeah - that 
would be cool ... but none saying "this is how it is done".  I'm also 
contacting citeseer as they don't include any metadata for their PDF 
downloads but they do have it in their system so it must have occured 
to them that this would be a good idea...

J

>>
>> If so could bibdesk develop into a read-write system for these tags?
>
> Absolutely. I'd be on that immediately.
>
>>
>> Forgive me if this is well known - I probably haven't done as much 
>> research as I should do before posting this here.
>
> I don't know too much about the PDF metadata, so I'm not sure what 
> could be done there, but maybe it'll be a real possibility... I just 
> don't know much about the PDF format. Know any good references?
>
> -mike
>
>>
>> Thanks,
>> James