Re: [Ebib-users] feature request: searching online databases

[Joost K. <joo...@fa...>]

Robbie Morrison <ro...@ac...> writes:
[database connectivity]
> Two approaches were traversed:
>
>  * interoperability with Zotero -- through their public
>    APIs (what ever they are)
>
>  * more-or-less what was indicated by Mandar --
>    moreover, pybliographer (sourceforge.net), now
>    inactive, had code to do this:
>
>    http://pybliographer.org
>
>   "search external databases like PubMed, Web of
>    Science, Citeseer, and more"
>
>    I never used pybliographer, although I registered
>    for their mailing list five years ago.
>
>    This kind of code will no doubt require ongoing
>    maintenance because the URLs/APIs/data
>    interfaces are liable to drift over time.

Yes, that's one reason why I was thinking about Zotero. Zotero actually
encourages external projects connecting to its server. There's an
official, published API: <http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/server_api>.

Furthermore, it's a well-established, open-source reference management
system, that connects to various online databases, so Ebib wouldn't have
to track all of those.

The main disadvantage is that I currently don't really have the time to
delve into all of that. Zotero is (unfortunately ;-) not written in
Elisp, nor is its API, so it would definitely require a bit of time to
get into it and to learn how it all works...

J.


-- 
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments