Hi everybody: Concerning the Axiom bibliography, Bob made the point that perhaps we shouldn't worry about organization of the bibliography as a whole, since its primary purpose is to serve as a repository for bib references used in pamphlets. I may have gotten a false impression from earlier discussions, so before I go further maybe we should decide definitely a couple of things:
a) Do we want to include annotations as part of the bibliography? Personally, my feeling on this is that we should, and I believe it is something Tim suggested we should do. Virtually all of Axiom is in the form of literate documents ala pamphlet files, which I approve of. In the one, specific case of the bibtex bibliography data however, I believe a pamphlet (or at least a .bib.pamphlet file) is not the correct way to make it "literate". The document content (in whatever eventual form) will be bibtex paper entries and our comments (if any) about that paper. This means that a pamphlet file would consist of large amounts of "code" (the bibtex syntax) and then our annotations about the paper in question, which are often likely to be fairly minimal. Given this, the thing that makes the most sense to me is to not introduce the extra overhead of the pamphlet structure, but take advantage of the fact that bibtex is already structured. If we want to "see" the bibliography as a whole (more on this later), we can include it in a "bibliography" latex document which could provide the "pamphlet" part of the system. I like Bob's description of axiom.bib as a database, as opposed to a document - I think that's a good way to look at it. Next question - what do we want to "do" with the annotations? Do we want them to simply be attached to the bibliography as a note for people who want to find notes about the paper? Do we include the annotation in each pamphlet's LaTeX output? My thoughts on this, which I expect will not be universal, are 1) We should not include the annotations in pamphlet-level output by default, to avoid possibly undesirable length of the document. 2) Rather we should have a link available to an entry in an ouput document which does have the annotation available, if the user wants that. 3) a build time option of including or not including annotations in pamphlet files might be a good idea - this can be accomplished by changing which bst file is used (presumably there is a way to do something like copy axiom-plain.bst to axiom.bst prior to compiling the pamphlet files). The bst files will need to become literate documents. a) What do we want to do about the "complete bibliography as a volume" idea? Number 2 above suggests one of the reasons I favor having a complete document containing all bibliography entries - that complete document will include the annotations for each entry. Another reason I have touched on earlier - with this document organized according to MSC2000 and PACS, it will be possible for a researcher to quickly access the level of coverage Axiom has attained in a particular research subfield. It will also provide a mechanism for classifying Axiom pamphlets according to subject, which I believe was of some interest earlier. If we view the axiom.bib file as a database, many interesting transformations become possible - assembling mini-bibliographies for a single subject, assembling a bibliography of pamphlets only, finding all papers in all subjects from a particular journal, etc. etc. etc. Plus, if we are to publish Axiom someday as "volumes", we might be able to provide a mechanism where the "global" bibliography volume could group papers by subject with an indication of which pamphlets they are cited by. This might actually be possible with existing tools (http://www.tug.org/pipermail/macostex-archives/2004-June/006647.html), and if there is interest I will look into it further. In this fashion, we are more or less building a roadmap to the Axiom system via mathematical subject. It allows someone to ask the question "I wonder if Axiom implements this idea from this paper?" They can then check the bibliography by subject looking for that paper, and if it exists check the pamphlets referenced by it. Naturally, the latex document(s) needed for this must be generated at real time based on the bibliography (and possibly the pamphlets themselves). Right now I'm using unix system tools. Probably the way to eventually do it would be to move the logic into Lisp and streamline it, but while I'm not yet up to that I can at least get something working which can eventually be transferred to Lisp. (We will probably also want things like CL-PPCRE, which I'm not sure works under GCL - particularly non ANSI GCL.) I think it will become very important, as we move forward, to have some kind of system that is consistent, comprehensive, and agreed upon. While Axiom is now technically composed of literate documents, most of those consist almost completely of source code. The real work of turning them into complete, properly referenced papers is still ahead of us, so now is the time (IMHO) to put something in place which will scale up as far as might be needed in the future. Since this is a decision and a convention that would have widespread results, I invite comment and discussion. Cheers, Cliff __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! 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