1st cut XHTML+RDFa export from BibDesk bibliography database

I made a crude xhtml+rdfa export template for BibDesk - 
http://svn.foaf-project.org/foaftown/research/

Idea is that when people 'export as HTML' they do so in a form that is a 
more or less machine-readable version of the bibtex.

BibDesk is "A graphical BibTeX bibliography database manager for Mac OS 
X.". OpenSource.

I managed to build it in Xcode easily enough, then found that basic 
export templates can be created without hacking the source. Copying the 
two files from 
http://svn.foaf-project.org/foaftown/research/bibdesk-templates/ into a 
macosx user's ~"/Library/Application Support/Bibdesk/Templates" 
directory should do the job.

Issues encountered:

1. the markup is heavily based on the default exporter (and which the 
above technique will overwrite; DONT do this if you have your own local 
customisations).

2. it seems that BibDesk makes no effort to escape markup for XML/XHTML

I've changed nbsp  to numeric #160 entity references, but if the 
text-to-be-exported contains certain characters, the output is illformed 
XML. My workaround for now is to maintain a hand-cleaned BibDesk 
database. Not ideal.

3. the data is pretty crappy. My testbed came from an import from Google 
Scholar. I've not looked at options for customisation, or ways of 
separating out the different authors. At some point real source code 
patching will be needed. Nearby vocab / mapping work to look at 
http://wiki.bibliontology.com/index.php/BibTeX_mapping and 
http://www.zotero.org/

If anyone feels like taking over this experiment and seeing it through 
to a more stable state, be my guest!

cheers,

Dan


ps. I've posted a sample HTML output in 
http://svn.foaf-project.org/foaftown/research/ along with the results of 
parsing it with rapper (the *.nt file). In doing so this threw up what 
looks like a bug in the Raptor's RDFa parsing; Manu, can you take a look 
at I'm not sure if it's a librdfa thing or a raptor thing. 
http://bugs.librdf.org/mantis/view.php?id=289

Received on Monday, 17 November 2008 23:10:24 UTC