Posted on Thursday 26 January 2006
This is a short description of some recent tool support I’ve set up for managing bibliographies of scientific publications etc.
BibTex is a well known file format for representing bibliographies. It’s tailored for use with the LaTex typesetting framework, and enables bibliographies to be managed independently from the works that need to reference them. Previously I had always managed a separate bibliography for each work, embedded in that work, but I find myself commonly reusing the same references, and wanted a more effective way of managing my bibliographies.
I looked into tool support for authoring and managing BibTex files, and found the TeXlipse plugin for Eclipse. TeXlipse is actually a fully featured LaTex development environment, but of course includes a BibTex editor. You have to have a LaTex distribution already installed on your system, I downloaded the Protext distribution for Windows which self-installs without problem. With TeXlipse you get content-assist while editing LaTex documents, and especially useful is the feature that provides content-assist for inserting citations to a referenced bibliography.
However, most of the documents I create are authored in HTML not LaTex. So I went in search of a tool that can generate an HTML representation of a BibTex bibliography. I tried a couple, but the one I’ve got working is BibTeXML. This distribution very simply provides a Python script which generates a pure XML representation of a bibliography from a BibTex file, according to the BibTeXML DTD. You can then use a number of XSL stylesheets to transform the XML bibliography into (X)HTML. I actually fiddled with the stylesheets that come with the BibTeXML distribution and created my own BibTeXML-to-XHTML stylesheet. Here’s a sample bibliography produced using this stylesheet (view source to see the XML).
Being a Semantic Web developer, I thought I ought to be able to also publish my bibliographies in RDF, linked from the referring documents so that tools like Piggy Bank can find them. I found an online services that will generate some RDF directly from a BibTex file, the BibTeX-2-RDF translator by Michael Klein, which generates RDF according to the OntoWeb ontology. This is a pretty true translation of the BibTex datamodel, which seems OK for now, especially as I know of no de-facto RDF standard for representing bibliographies as yet. Here’s a sample bibliography in RDF, generated using the BibTex-2-RDF translator.
Finally, I tried out a plugin for wordpress that allows you to upload bibliographies as BibTex from the site admin control panel, and then write pages based on a template that renders the stored bibliographies as HTML. I tried out Tarek Ali Chaaban’s wordpress plugin for BibTex, but it’s a bit dodgy at the moment. I had to fiddle around with the PHP pages to make it work, and also found out that the underlying database model doesn’t account for all the standard BibTex fields … but it’s a nice idea and will hopefully improve. Here is the link to a test bibliography page rendered using the BibTex plugin.