RefDB and Word-Processor Integration
RefDB author Markus Hoenicka discusses work he’s been doing on integrating the application with word-processors like OpenOffice. His argument:
Instead of expecting from all m bibliography tools out there to develop plugins for n word processors, thus placing a burden of maintaining m*n interfaces on the community, each word processor should implement a standardized interface to query and retrieve bibliographic data from any number of bibliography tools, which in turn have to support the same interface.
Indeed; I’ve been saying the same thing for years.
Of course, the devil is in the details, and this is a complicated problem. For example, if you have as your goal standardizing the interface so that it becomes easier for different tools to support a wider range of editors and word-processors, that doesn’t per se solve other problems. For example, it still leaves unanswered:
- How are citations encoded in the document?
- How are the citations and bibliography processed?
Even more fundamental from a use case perspective, if a user is now free to use different word-processors, are they also free to use different bibliographic data sources? Can they collaborate easily with their co-authors, who may or may not be using the same applications?
Markus’ proposed solution for the standard interface protocol is SRU, which is what we at the OOo bib project have advocated for quite awhile. WRT to my questions above, he has chosen to:
- use plain text markup within the document (rather than, say, fields) to encode the citation, using local (not global identifiers)
- a script scans the document and RefDB outputs a formatted RTF file
The implementation, then, has some limitations. As with Zotero, formatting is essentially specific to a particular application (and perhaps, even, database instance).
While I think Markus is right about the need for a standard interface, I think to really solve the issues I note above may well require moving more of the data and formatting logic and processing into the word-processor.
So imagine a Python/Perl/Ruby/Java library that was installed within the word-processor, and whose job it was to read standardized citation fields, match it to embedded (RDF in the case of OOo) source data, and to format the fields. So long as compliant applications could send the data in the right form, those documents would then be truly portable.
