Comments on: The Babel of Citations

By: darcusblog » Blog Archive » Are APIs Enough? - geek tools and the scholar

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:11:35 +0000

[...] Fenner discusses issues related to a recent post of mine, and concludes, first: Both Microsoft Word and OpenOffice should open up their citation APIs to [...]

By: darcusblog » Blog Archive » Citation Management Choices - geek tools and the scholar

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:50:47 +0000

[...] said, it’d be nice if applications could work on the problem I earlier outlined, as well as imagine server-based solutions that were not centralized (see laconica), so that users [...]

By: Bruce D'Arcus

Bruce D'Arcus — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 20:08:00 +0000

Hi Thomas. Sounds good!

I guess a practical way to proceed is figuring out how to integrate something like Zotero into KOffice, but in a generic way that would a) rely on standard ODF features (and so generic document encoding), and b) a generic API, so that other applications could similarly integrate with KOfifce, and that a similar (hopefully lightweight) approach could also be implemented in OOo.

That would go a long way towards enabling the sort of interoperability I suggest we need, at least within the OOo/KWord world.

The current (Python) code that Zotero uses to integrate with OOo is here.

BTW, I'm sorry I forgot to mention previous discussions we've had on this, which I earlier blogged about.

By: Thomas Zander

Thomas Zander — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 19:46:21 +0000

I think you will find a much higher uptake if you talk work with someone that is not a monopoly in their respective field.

I personally would find funds or manpower and start working on a plugin for KOffice, as I think that will give you a real-world usecase and something that works that doesn’t have a huge political and technical burden to overcome towards completion.

Think about it

ps. yes, I’m a core KOffice developer.