I found your site in my referer logs. To be honest, I’m not well-versed in bibliographic metadata; bibTeX is something that I’ve worked with in the past and so it felt like a nice starting place for me.

I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on better systems, especially MODS, which I’ve never heard of.

I’d drop you an e-mail, but I don’t see your address on the site…

Thanks,

Nick

The big thing is that I think it a mistake to think in terms of concrete classification (book, booklet, article, etc.). Better to think in terms of structural relationships as DC does (standalone objects versus those that are parts of other objects, etc.). The problem with DC is that it’s not fine-grained enough for bibliiographic purposes. MODS fixes that problem, which is why I think you ought to study it a bit.

Also, I just stubled on this interesting-but-not-yet-announced project:

http://disobey.com/noos/LibDB/index.cgi?HomePage

Have been reading this posting and agree with the fact that bibliogrpahic data should not be limited to a list of types. For my 4th year dissertation (Heriot-Watt Universit, Edinburgh, Computer Science) I am attempting to develop a reasonable data model in RDF to replace BibTeX. Bruce has come across this before. I have decide that there would be the equivalent of 2 objects to hold information and being RDF they (and the model) are easily exstensible. The objects are sources and entities. The source object encompasses any possible type and can have any details required. A field such as “in” describes that the source is part of another resource allowing the nesting as far as necessary. e.g an article in a book in a series with each being treated as a separate object. The entities object encompasses person or entity (publisher company or any other such`entity)details such as name and address. Any comments on these ideas would be great. thanks Richard