[Refdb-users] Re: Is refdb international?

[<js...@mi...>]

On Sat, 25 May 2002  "Markus Hoenicka" <hoe...@co...> wro=
te:

> Janusz S. Bie=F1 writes:
>  > I hope MySQL supports UNICODE in some form, which would be the optimal
>  > solution.
>=20
> Apparently it does, but in the case of multibyte character sets RefDB
> might actually be limiting. There are no provisions whatsoever to deal
> with multibyte characters. I'm not sure whether this really matters,
> but at least the transfer between computers with different endianness
> would fail. This could be fixed, however, with only little overhead.

I hope so. On the other hand, the problem of different endianness
occurs only if you use UTF-16, while in practice more popular seems
UTF-8 form, already supported `out of the box' by GNU Emacs.

>=20
>  >=20
>  > Another limiting factor may be the RIS format. Do I understand
>  > correctly that it is an informal standard introduced by commercial
>  > software?
>=20
> It is a de-facto standard used by the top 3 commercial reference
> management and bibliography tools. Meanwhile all 3 are sold by the
> same company (www.risinc.com), so the free transfer between these
> tools might be of some interest to the company. Unfortunately it is no
> "real" standard: no RFCs, no publicly available description etc. All I
> know about RIS is from the Reference Manager help file.
>=20
>  >  BTW, I think it would be good to include the explicit
>  > answer to this question in the documentation.
>=20
> Sure, as soon as I know the answer...

This is already a (kind of) answer.

Are you aware that the most official (ISO 2709) and popular MARC
format for bibliographic records has also an SGML/XML form? It's
somewhere on Library of Congress pages. When EndNote downloads a
record from a real library catalog, it probably get its in MARC format
and only later converts it and stores in the RIS file. I had no time
yet to check what is the output of free Z39.50 clients such as YAZ
(which hopefully will be some time in future integrated with refdb
:-)), but I suspect it must be quite close to MARC.

Now the question is: do you have an idea how difficult it would be to
provide support for MARC format either as an advanced option or as the
primary format? Perhaps it is just switching to a different DTD in the
right place?

>=20
>  > Anyway, what character
>  > codes are used in practice in existing RIS files? Is UNICODE
>  > explicitly allowed?
>  >=20
>=20
> There is no mentioning of character sets in the last Reference Manager
> version that I had access to (8.5, today they sell version 10). ISI
> Research Soft (their current name) are a US company, and the products
> seemed to be geared towards life sciences. The largest public database
> is Pubmed which uses latin-1 afaik. So you can imagine that they might
> not feel the urge to support lots of different character sets. But
> then, only the company knows for sure.
>=20
> >From a practical point of view, as long as the tags are ok, you should
> be able to use any character set in your RIS files. They might no
> longer be compatible to commercial software, though.

I had a very, very quick look at EndNote demo and I am intrigued by
the lack of any mention of character code issue. This is strange,
because bibliographic references are inherently multilingual (the
libraries, before switching to UNICODE, seemed to use internally some
other multibyte encodings). Looks like there is a need for some
experiments consisting in downloading bibliographic references in
different languages and checking the character code in the resulting
RIS file.

>=20
>  > Yesterday I made a quick try to install refdb in my office on Debian
>  > Woody. I don't remember exactly the messages (I write now from home),
>  > but the configure failed because libreadline is not present in Woody -
>  > it has been replaced by something else, which in turn is not
>  > recognized by refdb's configure.
>=20
> I just checked the Debian package list, and libreadline4 is available
> in unstable, testing, and stable. I'd be surprised if this lib would
> actually be dropped. You just need to make sure that you have the
> development libraries too, i.e. you need libreadline4 *and*
> libreadline4-dev.

Probably I was missing libreadline4-dev. On the other hand, I really
got some message about a missing library and I will try to reproduce
it.

Best regards

Janusz

--=20
                     ,=20=20=20
dr hab. Janusz S. Bien, prof. UW
Prof. Janusz S. Bien, Warsaw Uniwersity
http://www.orient.uw.edu.pl/~jsbien/
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