XOBIS and UnaLog
There are times when open source development is just … cool. Here’s one of them:
So Dan Chudnov’s unalog project is now serving up XOBIS records. XOBIS is a schema out of Stanford. Written in RELAX NG, XOBIS is one of the more ambitious attempts to wrestle with the problems of bibliographic metadata. For those in the free software world that think MODS is, um, abstract, try this:
<Record>
<ControlData>
<ID>
<OrganizationRef>unalog</OrganizationRef>
<Value>person/dchud/450</Value>
</ID>
<Actions>
<Action>
<Type set="Action Type">Created</Type>
<Time>
<Year>2004</Year>
<Month>08</Month>
<Day>09</Day>
<Hour>19</Hour>
<Minute>04</Minute>
<Second>25</Second>
<BeingRef id="dchud">Dan Chudnov</BeingRef>
</Time>
</Action>
</Actions>
<Types><Type set="Record Type">Original</Type></Types>
</ControlData>
<Work role="instance">
<Entry><Title>Brief backported patch from qx-1.0 to qx-0.7a3</Title></Entry>
<Description>
<Notation class="annotation">
<Value>Necessary for medusa server to work w/unalog.</Value>
</Notation>
</Description>
</Work>
<Relationships>
<Relationship class="geographic" type="associative">
<Name>Internet link</Name>
<Place>
<Entry scheme="RFC 2396">
<Name>http://irref.mine.nu/user/dchud/qx-0.7a3-http_request.py.patch</Name>
</Entry>
</Place>
</Relationship>
</Relationships>
</Record>
Unalog is a promising project, that over time I’d like to see blend more fully with bibliographic databases. Increasingly, online records are full citation resources.
