No editors in COinS?

So it looks like something simple like 'editor' is not available in COinS — only ordered authors — even though they did think about the difference between journals and books, and between books and book items. Am I right? I just want to check.
  • Never followed this up. COinS does have
    rft.au (This data element contains the full name of a single author, i. e. "Smith, Fred M", "Harry S. Truman".) and rft.aucorp (Organization or corporation that is the author or creator of the book, i.e. "Mellon Foundation")
    But nothing else. Seems to me `rft.auedit` would make perfect sense. Better in any case than coopting `rft.aucorp` for it (which would be the dirty workaround).
  • COinS sucks.

    Or to be less dramatic and more balanced, I don't think it's well suited to the sorts of use cases we care about.
  • edited August 31, 2011
    It's a damn shame that this is the fate of what could have been an easy and well documented way to share bibliographic metadata. I know that unapi and rdf and whatnot exist, but COinS is still one of the easiest ways to embed bibliographic metadata in html. (See related thread.)
  • And since it actually has seen quite wide adoption (with Zotero and Mendeley support, WordPress plugins, etc.) wouldn't it make sense to fix it up? Or would it be too much work to really make it satisfactory? In which case, is there an alternative that works as easily in HTML?
  • RDFa and/or microdata is a better way to "embed ... metadata in html."
  • edited August 31, 2011
    I freely admit to being clueless and ill informed. Any pointers to a document with clear use cases that shows how I can easily (1) generate such data (as I can generate COinS with Zotero) and (2) include it in web pages (as I can by copy-pasting COinS spans)?
  • Zotero doesn't yet read RDFa or other microdata apart from COinS. When someone adds support importing for something like that, I imagine we could make an export translator (like I just did for COinS) as well. But I agree with Mark here-- it's unfortunate that COinS took OpenURL as a starting point, since now we're stuck with the bare minimum that is useful for searches...
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