[xsl] xslt and citations in openoffice (was Re: [xsl] keys and variables)

Subject: [xsl] xslt and citations in openoffice (was Re: [xsl] keys and variables)
From: Bruce D'Arcus <bdarcus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2004 15:44:20 -0400
On Aug 23, 2004, at 2:49 PM, Wendell Piez wrote:

This architecture could certainly be rearranged to have OpenOffice be your ultimate target. (While I'm a fan of OpenOffice, however, I don't find its own XML to be robust and descriptive enough to be the mediating core format here, however -- though I suppose that could be changed, which is a big reason I like OpenOffice.)

I'm working on a proposal right now with an engineer at Sun that would remove all of the existing OOo bib code and replace it with a robust namespaced citation schema. The citations would then just point to an external MODS file embedded in the file wrapper (OOo files are zipped archives).


In case you're curious, a citation would then look something like this:

	<citation>
	  <citation-source>
              <biblioref linkend="doe99a">
                 <detail units="pages" begin="23" end="24"/>
              </biblioref>
	  <citation-source>
	  <citation-body>
              [... whatever rendered citation ...]
	  <citation-body>
	</citation>

In other words, at the level of the XML, the OpenOffice solution would look a lot the DocBook stuff I'm working with now, with the only difference that it has to hold presentation display code as well.

When inserting citations, they would likely be pre-rendered (so as to not force a constant recycling of the xslt process). If a user changes styles, the xslt is run on the MODS document, and the citation-body content is regenerated.

How's that?

It will be quite a technical and marketing achievement to come up with a solution that is so comprehensive, serviceable and user-friendly that it can compete with the widespread *belief* that Word and Endnote are up to the job already

I used to be a beta tester for Endnote. Don't even get me started on that company. As for their product, it won't be hard to best it so long as we get some programmers to implement the already good ideas we have.


In fact, I just heard from a guy that's going to put a team of CS students to work on a semester long project that could serve as the core of this, using the Berkley DB XML for storage, and a unified local/remote query layer built on SRW, which is the library world's web services protocol.

So imagine an application built on open XML and XSLT, using a rich metadata standard, and built from the ground up to query and ingest remote resources as easily as it does local records (the Library of Congress catalog in fact serves MODS records). Many scholars would ditch Word for OpenOffice in a heartbeat if they had a decent bibliographic tool, which is the goal of this work.

Is the glass starting to fill? ;-)

Bruce

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