One site that comes to mind is fact monster. They have a simple implementation with a link at the bottom of each page that opens a pop-up with the citation detail. Follow this link and look at the bottom of the page for the
button.A co-worker (thanks Steve) also sent me information about a NISO standard called OpenURL 1.0 (Z39.88-2004) which has come out of the library information community as a means to embed citation metadata in webpages. More detail can be found at the OpenURL COinS website.
4 comments:
I've started looking into the OpenURL stuff and must admit I'm a bit overwhelmed at the complexity for the simple purpose of automatically citing a source. Anyone else have feelings on OpenURL?
I'm with Dan on this one. OpenURL seems to have more power than is necessary for this application. While a citation mechanism is a part of it, OpenURL is so much more than that. My vote would be for a simple XML definition.
I've taken a deeper look at the work being done on the citation microformat and really like the direction. I think we should see if we can participate to help it meet our needs a little more closely. Depending on the success of the citation microformat we may need to implement something that is similar prior to a standard being finalized.
Non-locator identifiers (e.g. URNs) have never had any practical significance on the Internet because there is no standard infrastructure to de-reference them, no standard transfer representation, and no standard presentation format.
OpenURL is a simple solution to the first problem, by defining not only an extensible family of citation schemas, but standard way to embed them in URLs, allowing existing browsers to dereference them.
OpenURL is no more complex than any other generalizable meta-format. If one is not in the business of defining new citation types, creating and using OpenURL citations is about as simple as can possibly be imagined, certainly as simple or simpler than doing the same thing in GEDCOM.
What would be nice to add however, is a standard format for the content the citation refers to (not just the citation itself), so that an intelligent application could do more than simply render whatever random HTML the selected resolver decided to give it.
A document or document fragment should be able to be retrieved in a content oriented semantic representation such as DocBook, in addition to default HTML and PDF representations.
- Mark Butler
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