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

[Bruce D'Arcus <bdarcus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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