Comments on: Bibliographic metadata formats

By: mee

mee — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:50:36 +0000

Bibtex is good. If you don’t like its format, there is an application called “referencer” which uses a xml-like file to manage bibtex files. Since xml might be more “machine-readable” than bibtex you could take a look at “refeence”

By: Jakob

Jakob — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 22:28:22 +0000

I all depends on what you want to do with the data - "machine-readable" is almost everything to some degree. If your requirement is to be semantic-web compatible, use The Bibliographic Ontology. If you want to use the data for bibliographies, use BibTeX. If you want to exchange data with library (and only with libraries), use some of their obscure formats like MARC. Ok, MODS is worth a try: It's XML and compatible with MARC.

By: chris

chris — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 07:47:45 +0000

OpenURL COinS: A Convention to Embed Bibliographic Metadata in HTML: http://www.ocoins.info/

By: pel

pel — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:00:45 +0000

I’ve never come across anything that has had any wide use except Dublin Core (or can produce it on demand) – that goes especially for semantic web stuff.

Well there are other formats in wide use – but I would refrain from calling them “bibliographic”.

By: xurfa

xurfa — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:27:07 +0000

Today I wouldn’t consider anything that is not unicode-positive. I would try e.g. the UNI-MARC standard used in libraries.

By: Niko

Niko — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 08:53:51 +0000

Try this one:
http://www.ncd.matf.bg.ac.yu/casopis/14/NCD14043.pdf

see chapter 5:
5. Unified E-Book Format

You can use any bibl. format inside that format

By: Wouter Bolsterlee

Wouter Bolsterlee — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:00:35 +0000

Perhaps the Dublin Core vocabulary [1] expressed in RDF (possibly represented as RDF/XML) [2] satisfies your needs… optionally you can extend this with your own terms in additional RDF schemas.

[1] http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/
[2] http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-rdf/

By: Stuart

Stuart — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:59:41 +0000

marcxml is the Library of Congress update to marc 21 for modern electronic storage of bibliographic data.

http://www.loc.gov/standards/marcxml/

By: Shaun McCance

Shaun McCance — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:56:33 +0000

Do the bibliography formats of DocBook or TEI suit your needs?

http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/bibliography.html
http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/CO.html#COBI

By: Frej Soya

Frej Soya — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:12:06 +0000

Just remember that the important part is semantics (ie. ontologies), and dublin core gets you quite far for a very basic set of 15 el elements… From there you can always expand…with you own schema/ontology (works fine for internal use) or whatever is else is out there…. also RDF is a very nice and simple abstraction for structuring meta data….

The ‘oldtech’ way is just to use bibtex/ris or similar…avoid MARC it’s old and comes with a lot of cruft….. (even the XML version).

But it’s been some years since i worked at a university library.. one thing to remember about RDF is that XML serialization is just a possibility (and pretty much only handy for machines…..).

But for java it shouldn’t be a problem ,there several RDF parsers out there, that works with several format.