BibBliki

I’ve come to the conclusion that weblogs, wikis and bibliographic databases ought to blur together. Weblogs provide a good way to distribute content (including one’s own notes), and wikis a superior way to author linked structured content.

So here’s a random – maybe even stupid – idea:

How about a bibliographic plug-in for a php/mysql weblog system like WordPress?

Here’s my thinking, using RefDB as the bibliographic database. RefDB has a extended annotation system, complete with a dedicated DTD. The content looks something like a weblog feed, in fact. So, let’s say you have a bibliographic record. The workflow could be:

  1. click “comments” link, and a UI appears exactly like a weblog comment UI
  2. enter comments
  3. choose whether the comments are public or private (something which WordPress already supports)
  4. public comments are then presented as weblog items

Is there any promise here, or do I just need some more coffee?

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 21st, 2004 at 10:20 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

6 Comments

  1. alf says:
    5/21/2004 at 10:43 am

    Sounds a bit like the way commenting on articles works with biologging - http://www.biologging.com - when using the posting links from HubMed. I’ve been trying to think of a useful, reusable format to output users’ data apart from HTML and RSS, so if you have any ideas…

    Also, where’s the wiki in your idea?

  2. Bruce says:
    5/21/2004 at 10:50 am

    Interesting. You can see an example of the refdb note data here:

    http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/refdb/refdb/examples/xnoteset.xml?rev=1.3&view=markup

    The wiki part starts to add some complexity but ideally I’d like the comment feature to use wiki markup for quick semantic authoring that can be converted to rich XML, and be able to use the linking faciliting to link to other notes and/or bibliographic records.

  3. Ed Taekema says:
    6/8/2004 at 9:23 pm

    This is a very interesting idea… are you thinking then of combining these tools into a note taking/outlining tool or a reserach database tool? That is something that I am extremely interested in … particularly if it were open source.

  4. Ed Taekema - Road Warrior Collaboration says:
    6/8/2004 at 9:29 pm

    BibBliki When I was working on several papers in my senior year of University, I developed a research tool that allowed for structured note taking which was cross referenced to my bibliography. Essentially, it was an automated version of the old 3 x 5 cards …

  5. Bruce says:
    6/9/2004 at 12:36 pm

    It would be a combination note-taking and research tool, and may even blur into a full document system (say if using an xml db). Alf tells me he’s been testing RefDB, so that’s good.

  6. jonathan says:
    6/26/2004 at 5:55 am

    darcusb,

    I’m in the midst of working on a very simple bibliowiki (in php and mysql) with commenting and blogging options for users. (very similar to what you lay out in your post) The innovative part of it will be that it will allow users to create lists of items (like on Amazon), and annotate these lists. I should have an alpha version ready in a few weeks. It will hopefully do away with the need for endnote, and will make sharing easier. Please contact me if your interested.

    Also have you seen the wikindx project?

    jonathan

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