Cocoon/Popoon/Syncato and a Bibliographic Interface
I’m quite intrigued by web UI technologies that take advantage of XML and XSLT. The most prominent example is Cocoon. The eXist native XML database project takes advantage of Cocoon. The project even provides a demo that presents bibliographic data in quite interesting ways, almost all implemented with xsl code. Indeed, I was easily able to modify it to handle data conforming to an alternative schema I’ve been working on.
Turns out the author of eXist – Wolfgang Meier – is a social scientist. He has also been involved in development of the SozioNet bibliographic metadata portal out of Germany, which includes an interesting form-based UI called the MetaWizard.
Popoon is PHP-based equivalent to Cocoon, and Syncato, is many ways a Python equivalent.
It seems to me all of these could provide a good basis on which to build a next generation web-based bibliographic interface.
