CiteProxy: Networked Citations
Alf Eaton has posted a note about his experiments with CiteProc, and his efforts to adapt it to his own workflow. With his CiteProxy script, Alf has come up with the sort of thing I was envisioning awhile back: that in an ideal world, I would never have to manage my own citation metadata, but my tools would simply get that data as needed from the network.
CiteProc assumes all of a document’s metadata will be accessible from a single source: a local flat file, or an online RESTful interface. With CiteProxy, Alf has smartly realized that you can fool CiteProc by just offering it a proxy. So, send it a list of references you want—using say a pubmed id or doi—and let the proxy go and find the metadata for you.
I really think this approach has a lot of promise, and examples like CiteProxy are just the beginning.
