Re: tasks overview wishlist: Canonical citing reference
Dear all,
last year, Michael opened a discussion to have bibliographic information
displayed in package summaries:
http://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/20081007205357.GA1582@nighthawk.chemicalconnection.dyndns.org
In the discussion that followed, we talked about where to store this
information, and in which format, since adding more content to the
debian/control file is not an easy thing (it ‘costs’ a lot because it goes to
pivotal files like the Packages.gz files on our mirrors). A four line summary
is available here: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience/References
This year, some progresses are being made. For the display, Andreas has
modified the ‘Web sentinels’ so that they can display bibliographic
informations. See http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/tasks/bio for instance.
But currently the limitation of the system is that the bibliographic
information is in a quite remote location, in the Blends ‘tasks’ files.
I am currently working on a new workflow which would help the maintainers to
document bibliographic information and much more, and would be very interested
to hear your comments.
As Michael suggested initially, for bibliographyait consists in having ‘DOI’ or
‘PubMed’ fields in a file contained in the source package, in that case
‘debian/upstream-metadata.yaml’. When the package is stored in a VCS, it is
quite easy to extract it and to assemble package summaries. See for instance
the following URLs:
http://upstream-metadata.debian.net/table/DOI
http://upstream-metadata.debian.net/table/Homepage
I hope these tables can be pipelined into the ‘Ultimate Debian Database’
(http://wiki.debian.org/UltimateDebianDatabase) and be the basis for the
generation of our Blends ‘Web sentinels’.
A discussion takes place on the debian-QA mailing list:
http://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/20091022074910.GA20846@an3as.eu
Please feel free to join it if you would like.
For the more specific target of documenting references, I propose to reopen
here the discussion started by Michael. Whole BibTeX bibliographies can be
stored: ‘http://upstream-metadata.debian.net/table/Reference’;. BibTeX is not
the only reference format, but has the advantage of being used by most
publishers for citation retreival (but not for paper subission…).
Nevertheless, if there are good reasons to not store monolithic BibTeX
references and use another format or approach, I would be very interested to
hear them.
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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