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General: How to make Zotero friendly websites?

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    • CommentAuthorschnippy
    • CommentTimeNov 12th 2006
     
    I'm working on a large research database website and I can see the benefit of making it easy for users to extract citations and export them to other formats. Are there any pointers for content developers who want to help expand the number of zotero-friendly websites? What format should the data be in?

    Thanks,

    - s
    • CommentAuthornoksagt
    • CommentTimeNov 12th 2006
     
    An easy step which would allow you to work with Zotero and some other apps would be to embed COinS:
    <http://ocoins.info/>
    Zotero also reads embedded RDF, so that is a possible alternative. Zotero also has plans to eventually implement UnAPI support. If you fail to implement any of these embedded formats, at least allow RIS export (also useful for Endnote)--Zotero can catch those if users manually export them from your site.

    refbase is a GPLed MySQL/PHP project which has COinS and UnAPI support:
    <http://refbase.sourceforge.net/>
    • CommentAuthortdowling
    • CommentTimeNov 15th 2006
     
    COinS cannot include abstracts, keywords, or subject headings, and I haven't found a way to get Zotero to recognize multiple author names. That's just part of using OpenURL.

    I also can't get it to respond to DC.Type tags to recognize a page as anything other than a general text document.

    So, is there a good example of Zotero-friendly embedded RDF people can copy into their own pages?
    • CommentAuthornoksagt
    • CommentTimeNov 15th 2006 edited
     
    Multiple authors in COinS can be added by using multiple 'au=' for second through last author (as opposed to 'aulast' and 'aufirst' for the first author). Again, see how refbase does it:
    http://arc.nucapt.northwestern.edu/refbase/show.php?author=seidman

    COinS is currently embedded in MANY more sites and used by many more applications than embedded RDF, so it is a good idea to support it anyway.

    You are right that the absence of abstracts and keywords is a major limitation of COinS. And you are also right that the COinS parser for Zotero could still be improved.

    Embedded RDF is described and sampled on http://research.talis.com/2005/erdf/wiki/Main/RdfInHtml
    • CommentAuthornoksagt
    • CommentTimeNov 15th 2006
     
    And here's the schema: <http://purl.org/net/biblio>
    • CommentAuthortdowling
    • CommentTimeNov 16th 2006
     
    Thanks for the pointers.
    • CommentAuthorts
    • CommentTimeNov 16th 2006
     
    For the embedded formats, do any provide a way to specify that an attachment goes with a bibliographic entry?

    For example, if I have a page of pdf's of papers and the citations that go with them. I'd like Zotero users to be able to grab what they want, like the JSTOR scraper that grabs the papers as attachments with the bibliographic entry.
    • CommentAuthorMatthias
    • CommentTimeNov 18th 2006 edited
     
    unAPI support in Zotero would allow Zotero users to automatically grab PDFs that are associated with any record displayed on an unAPI-enabled site.

    http://unapi.info/

    Since the Zotero folks seem to be committed to supporting open standards, it is my hope that we'll eventually see unAPI support in Zotero. This would allow Zotero to grab any metadata, bibliographic format (Endnote, RIS, BibTeX, RDF, etc) and/or (PDF) file that's associated with a record displayed on an unAPI-enabled website. Using unAPI, Zotero would also be able to grab any given abstracts and keywords.

    For anyone with a little web programming skills, implementation of the unAPI service is rather straightforward. The unAPI spec and help notes do all fit on a single page:

    http://unapi.info/specs/

    For people interested in implementing an unAPI service for their own site, I've written some info about an existing unAPI implementation which also includes some usage examples:

    http://unapi.refbase.net

    If many sites would support standard retrieval mechanisms such as COinS, embedded RDF and/or unAPI, this would also significantly reduce the need for the Zotero guys to develop site-specific scrapers (which will surely break at some point in time and will thus need permanent maintenance).
    • CommentAuthornoksagt
    • CommentTimeNov 18th 2006
     
    I do have a question for the Zotero devs: What is the planned behavior for sites that support multiple embedded standards? Will we get every record listed several times (once for each way they are embedded)? Will they be prioritized somehow and, if so, what will that priority be? Or will there be some intelligent system that tries to extract information from all the embedded formats & combine it (and, if this is the case, how will conflicting information be handled)?
    • CommentAuthorkkraus
    • CommentTimeNov 21st 2006
     
    noksagt, I'm re-posting your question to the development forum.
    • CommentAuthorjim
    • CommentTimeNov 26th 2007
     
    Hi,

    I too am interested in making our pages easily digestible for Zotero.

    I notice from the "compatible standards and software" page (http://www.zotero.org/documentation/compatible_standards_and_software) that Zotero supports Dublin Core.

    Does this mean that making a web page Zotero-compatible is just a case of adding "DC.Whatever" meta tags to the page?

    (If this is the case it seems preferable to using the COinS system - I think additional meta tags should be relatively easy to automatically drop into page headers, but I'm sure I'm missing something as it reads as if the COinS method is generally preferred.)

    Thanks,
    Jim
    • CommentAuthorjim
    • CommentTimeNov 30th 2007
     
    Hi,

    Apologies if it's considered impolite to reply to your own messages on this forum, but I went ahead and tried my suggestion about adding some DC metadata to a webpage and Zotero seems to be able to grab it just fine.

    I used the following subset of the Dublin Core which seems to work well:

    <meta name="DC.Title" content="A webpage by Jim">
    <meta name="DC.Creator" content="Jim">
    <meta name="DC.Subject" content="stuff, not much">
    <meta name="DC.Description" content="Just a bit of a test to see how Zotero grabs DC metadata">
    <meta name="DC.Publisher" content="Jim">
    <meta name="DC.Type" content="Text">
    <meta name="DC.Format" content="text/html">
    <meta name="DC.Language" content="en-GB">
    <meta name="DC.Rights" content="Copyright Jim">

    I think Zotero put the description metadata in its "Extra" field rather than "Abstract where I guess it should be, but other than that everything looked properly aligned.

    I hope that's useful.

    Regards,
    Jim
    • CommentAuthorTjowens
    • CommentTimeNov 30th 2007
     
    Thanks Jim,

    It is by no means impolite to answer your own question, it adds to the collective wisdom here in these forums. I meant to comment before. If you want to add metadata to individual pages Dublin Core is in fact a great way to get the basics in. But keep in mind that Zotero will only grab one DC item from a page.

    COinS works well if you want to add metadata for a list of items. So if you wanted to allow someone to capture a entire bibliography or several search results COinS is probably a better way to go.
  14.  
    How about, META name="description", META name="keywords", etc. support?

    I ask because the "Create New Item from Current Page" feature ignores them -- and what if, as in many pages, no other format of meta data exists?

    The META HTML tag is probably considered deprecated or something, but it would (or should be) trivial to add some code to support them if they exist and no other similar meta tags exist.

    As it is, for many pages I will be adding to Zotero, I will have to manually add information that Zotero should be adding itself.
  15.  
    How about, META name="description", META name="keywords", etc. support?

    We could import them, but the quality varies widely. Author is probably the most reliable. Description could become Abstract or Extra, but it's quite unpredictable and often not particularly useful. Keywords could be parsed as tags, but they're often designed for (circa-1998) search engines and rather redundant.

    On the other hand, I suppose it's easier to ignore/remove data than add it manually...
    • CommentAuthoryjchen
    • CommentTimeDec 21st 2007
     
    I wrote a post about how to support Zotero with unAPI. It uses Rails, but is easily applied to other framework. Here is the link: http://blog.reciprocallattice.com/2007/12/add-unapi-support-in-rails-application.html

    It is really easy in my own opinions. Just need to reply three requests from Zotero.
  17.  
    tdowling above said:

    "I also can't get it to respond to DC.Type tags to recognize a page as anything other than a general text document."

    Has anyone figured this out? I'd like to eventually get people to use COinS, but in the short term I think I'll have better luck with Dublin Core. But, no matter what I do, I can't get the type detected.
    • CommentAuthorsean
    • CommentTimeJan 30th 2008
     
    Have you tried setting DC.Type to a Zotero item type? For example, book, journalArticle, bookSection, etc?

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