AGGREGATIN CITATION STYLES

matteo.romanello
Hi all -
since the Zotero Style repository counts as of now lots of citation styles, I would like to share some thoughts about the possibility of aggregating the existing citation styles.

I guess that for both developers and final users would be useful to access the repository browsing styles by similarity. Provided that CSL styles are XML files, it would not so hard to group styles by their features.

In particular I have in my mind two scenarios: 1) a user is looking for a specific citation style but, since this style is not present within the repository,the user wants to pick up the closest one; 2) a developer needs to create a new citation style but (instead of starting from scratch) this developer would like to be able to start from the style in the repository which is closest to the one he/she has to develop.

There is already any work toward this direction?
Best

Matteo Romanello
  • bdarcus
    There has been discussion of this (see, for example, some stuff from my blog), but am not sure how far any actual coding has gotten or not (since, ahem, the server code is still inaccessible).
  • noksagt
    edited March 19, 2009
    Regarding code: it should be relatively trivial to grep through existing styles & add characteristics to a database for easier lookup.

    I already have code that compares user-inputted HTML of how they want their citations to look to the HTML examples on the Zotero server (this was also a relatively simple & braindead script).

    I don't think we necessarily need the Zotero CSL repository code to do any of this, but it would certainly be useful to have if the Zotero team wanted to host a better repository interface & would welcome our contributions. If this is a low priority, I guess we can host this elsewhere (xbiblio?). I don't think it matters who hosts the interface because, ideally, it would index CSL files that were on other sites as well.

    (also, you don't need to put your post's subject in all caps)
  • bdarcus
    I just posted the start of a little Ruby script on the xbib list yesterday which is intended as a lightweight solution for the publishing part. It is intended to just iterate through a directory of CSL files, and from that create by-category Atom and HTML files, complete with previews. So it's the simple and static file version of what I was doing with the Django experiment.

    I haven't yet figured out if citeproc-rb is complete enough to do reliable previewing though.

    I imagine your script could be used to enhance this.
  • dstillman
    There's been some work on an updated interface to the translator and CSL repositories, offering better ways for users to browse and find existing styles, request new translators/styles, report problems, and contribute fixes, but it was put on hold temporarily due to other priorities. We'll try to get it up soon and open it up for contributions.

    We're happy to host other tools as well.

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