(Manually) exposing metadata, including attachments, in WordPress

mark · August 25, 2011

I have read exposing metadata. Questions remain.

My use case is a small WordPress-driven site that is not going to have much more than thirty references, some of which are presented with PDFs. (The site is not live yet.) What I would like to do is expose metadata in such a way that Zotero users can surf by and save the resources described on the webpage, *including the PDFs*.

I know of ZotPress, and the unapi server and COinS plugins. ZotPress lists a bibliography, even including PDFs, but does not expose metadata. The unapi server plugin serves metadata of posts but not metadata contained within posts (and could it expose the PDFs?). Which leaves COinS, but COinS has two major issues: (1) it does not seem to allow links to attachments; and (2) it is incomplete in its support of metadata, e.g. doesn't appear to have "editor".

What else is there?

ajlyon · August 25, 2011

There is no other out-of-the-box solution. One reasonable approach would be for ZotPress to embed or extend the unAPI server, to serve references for its embedded data (with links to the PDFs) as well. UnAPI was designed to be trivial to implement, and maybe Katie would be willing to add it to ZotPress.

mark · August 31, 2011

Thanks. That's what I thought. It is unfortunate that the possibilities are so limited at present.

By the way, do you know where to go with the issue that COinS doesn't have the creator type "Editor"? It would be such a trivial thing to implement, I wonder whether COinS cannot be updated to reflect it. http://ocoins.info makes it seem like COinS is now a fossilized standard.

(update: I have emailed Eric Hellman and am awaiting a reply>)

pbinkley · September 17, 2011

UnAPI is the better solution: it's intended to serve multiple formats for a given item, and there's not reason why PDF couldn't be one of the formats on offer. Zotero's UnAPI importer would then just have to be trained to fetch PDFs when a UnAPI server offers them. The UnAPI plugin for Wordpress just offers metadata about the current post, not about bibliographic items mentioned in it, so this would be a feature better implemented in ZotPress.

COinS, like OpenURL on which it is based, is only intended to provide enough metadata to enable a link resolver to deal with the citation; it isn't intended to handle the full potential richness of bibliographic citations. It's a linking mechanism, not a citation format.

ajlyon · September 17, 2011

I keep making unfulfilled promises to implement RDFa in Zotero, and I'm still seriously planning on it. Hopefully I'll come through with something relatively soon.

mark · September 19, 2011

@pbinkley, thanks for clarifying. That helps to understand why COinS is as it is.

I really hope some UnAPI/RDF implementation will come along that makes it dead easy to embed citation metadata on the web.

pascal.martineau · April 4, 2016

@ajlyon, any updates on the RDFa translator?

adamsmith · April 4, 2016

no, no RDFa anytime soon (and ajlyon unfortunately doesn't have much time to devote to Zotero anymore). We should get JSON-LD support based on schema.org within a couple of months or so, though, including the ability to export JSON-LD (which would be very tricky to do with RDFa, given that we'd have to merge it with how bibliographies are created.)