Atom and MODS
I’ve been chatting with BibDesk developer Mike McCracken more about using Atom to syndicate MODS content. We’ve concluded that the following is perfectly valid Atom:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/ns#draft-ietf-atompub-format-04"
version="draft-ietf-atompub-format-04 : do not deploy">
<head xml:lang="en">
<author>
<name>Bruce D'Arcus</name>
</author>
<title>Public Space Readings</title>
<link href="http:://www.test.com"/>
<category label="topic" term="public space"/>
<updated>2005-01-25T13:52:08Z</updated>
</head>
<entry>
<title>Some Article</title>
<content type="application/xml+annote">
<div class="bibnotes" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<div class="summary">
<p>Some notes with <q cite="doe99a@23-24">a quote that spans <span
class="pagebreak"/> pages</q>.</p>
</div>
</div>
</content>
<content type="application/xml+mods">
<mods ID="doe99" xmlns="http://www.loc/gov/mods/v3">
<titleInfo>
<title>Some Title</title>
</titleInfo>
</mods>
</content>
<updated>2005-01-25T13:52:08Z</updated>
<link href="http://www.example.com/one.xml"/>
</entry>
</feed>
I’m liking this idea! There are still some issues to consider though:
- annotation markup XHTML or specific schema? It’s really important to me that annotations be able to encode at the very minimum the specific location in a text where a quote comes from (e.g. it’s page number(s)). So either you do it by hacking XHTML a bit (as I do above), or you write a tailored schema (which I’ve done), but lose the advantages of XHTML. I’d like the solution to be amenable to wiki-languages like Textile too.
- linking I would like the linking between annotation and mods record to be self-contained, and not rely (only) on Atom. In my eXist DB, my annotations are stored in a separate collection, but linked to their MODS referent(s) (one can link to more than one).
- IDs That suggests—in a net-enabled sharing environment—the need to think again about this issue.
Update: Seems I was wrong about the ability to use multiple content elements in an entry. Still, the xhtml content could be moved to the summary element.
