[Refdb-users] ref ID, user defined? + some plans (long)

[Markus H. <hoe...@co...>]

Hi Paul,

Paul Borgermans writes:
 > 1) To reach this goal there are is one major issue:
 > We need both import and export from/to *existing* reference systems and 
 > databases ( these range from personal "databases" to groups who are 
 > using a common database/system.). To maintain backwards compatibility, 
 > the existing keys should be preserved in order not to break references 
 > in existing documents. I read in previous posts and the manual that user 
 > defined ID's are not supported or retained when importing.
 > 
 > Do you plan to integrate this in some way? Perhaps as an additional 
 > database field other than the default one and optionally coupled to the 
 > user? Of course this should be also an export option to select the key 
 > to use with a fall back to the refdb ID if no such key exists
 > 

I don't plan to add this feature to the 0.8.x series, but it is
actually implemented in the libdbi-pre1 CVS branch that will
eventually be released as 0.9. I checked in the changes just today.

The current implementation will try to use existing citation keys
(supplied as an alphanumeric string in the ID field of the RIS
dataset) and generate an error if the citation key already exists (it
has to be unique to make sense). If no citation key is supplied by the
user, RefDB will automatically generate one using the first author and
the publication year, followed by a sequential suffix to make it
unique if necessary. The only restriction is that the citation keys
must not be entirely numeric, i.e. "44" would not be allowed but
"Miller1999" would be. Please let me know whether this implementation
would match your needs.

 > 2) We will also develop a refdb SOAP service (in php, calling the refdb 
 > client utilities) which can be called by various applications (like the 
 > portals we plan to develop). Initially this will be a read-only service. 
 > I think other people may be interested in this as well (and we'll 
 > release the code of course).

I thought about SOAP myself, but I'd be more than happy if someone
beats me at it. Let me know if you need any changes on the RefDB side
to make this work.

BTW, what organization are you working for? Is that some University
project or something similar?

regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka <hoe...@co...>
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/hoenicka_markus/