Interoperable Bibliographic Citations
10 July 2006: TomElliott
Pleiades is happy to announce that we are collaborating with Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies' Technical Working Group, and with members of the Perseus Project at Tufts University, on a bibliographic referencing web service. The goal is to apply the CHS/TWG-developed Collections Service protocol to querying a bibliographic reference database.
AWMC/Pleiades has already developed a collection of digital bibliographic records in XML, encoding as <biblStruct> elements, using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) tagset. Works described by these records include all books, multi-volume reference works and journals cited in the Barrington Atlas, plus a number of articles from collections and journals, as well as new references added since 2000.
Uniform Resource Names (URNs) have been asserted for each of these works in an XML registry document that complies with the CHS/TWG recommendations for Registry Services. This dataset and its registry will be updated as conversion of Classical Atlas Project data continues (i.e., articles), and will eventually be dynamically published with the regular addition of bibliographic citations that have been created and vetted through the Pleiades publication workflow.
This AWMC dataset will be used by the CHS/TWG and Perseus team as the basis for initial development and testing. Concurrently, the TWG is working with the CHS Publications Group to develop a reference database with full bibliographic information for works referred to in CHS publications. This will allow for automated expansion of bibliographic references, and automated creation of bibliographic lists of sources used in a given CHS publication.
At present, Neel Smith (Holy Cross; CHS/TWG) has begun coding an intial Collections Service; Gabe Weaver (Perseus) has begun coding a query parser that converts queries expressed in the XPath-like syntax proposed for Collections into a Hibernate query objects.
Our hope is that these initiatives will eventually build out into a series of voluntary-adoption mechanisms for bibliographic citation in a computationally actionable, and highly interoperable, manner. The use of identical URNs for bibliographic works across projects and databases will permit data sharing, and easy integration with large publishing-industry and scholarly datasets (e.g., digital journals and Google Print) as they come on line. Within the community of projects using the CHS/Perseus/AWMC bibliographic scheme -- a community we hope will grow over time -- only one project will need to effect the "mapping" between a digital copy of a work and the URN already in use in order for all projects to be able to provide their users with direct links to that resource. Since, wherever possible, Pleiades will hold Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and other persistent work identifiers, we will be able to share this information with collaborating projects, and to receive similar data from them dynamically.
Some relevant links:
Pleiades: http://www.unc.edu/awmc/pleiades.html
AWMC/Pleiades registries: http://www.unc.edu/awmc/registries/
AWMC/Pleiades bibliographic records: http://www.unc.edu/awmc/bibliography/ (warning, this is a test dataset at present, and subject to summary revision as the code for writing it from our database matures)
Perseus: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu
Center for Hellenic Studies (CHS): http://www.chs.harvard.edu/
CHS Technical Working Group publications: http://chs75.harvard.edu/projects/diginc/techpub
CHS/TWG Collection Services specification: http://chs75.harvard.edu/projects/diginc/techpub/collections
CHS/TWG Registry Services specification: http://chs75.harvard.edu/projects/diginc/techpub/registry
About Uniform Resource Names (URNs), from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Name
Text Encoding Initiative (TEI): http://www.tei-c.org
Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs): http://www.doi.org/
