[texhax] BibTeX and its limitations

[Phil Sackinger]

On Mon, 2003-11-17 at 06:25, Richard wrote:
>  researching the problems associated with the BibTeX standard for
> bibliographic data and developing an RDF based data format for
> bibliographic data, which would overcome these problems.
> 
> As a user of BibTex:
> 
> Do you have any experiences of where BibTeX is cumbersome to use
> and/or inaccurate?
> 
> Are there any references that BibTeX does not handle very well?
> 
> Are there any other problems that you have come across?
> 
> 

I'd be really interested in an RDF based system, something that takes
advantage of XML.

Coming up with a namespace of good tags that is used consistently seems
to be very important.

Your RDG approach will hopefully solve one of my favorite gripes:

	No more than one person in the world should ever have 
	to create a BiBTeX entry for some particular piece
	of published work. 

An entry, once created, should be available in some public area, perhaps
a P2P network, where I could do something like:

\cite{http://bibtex.org/query.cgi?locale=en&author=lamport&title="*latex*"&edition="2"}

and have it create a the full, good bibliography entry for the piece of
work (or perhaps more than one work). I could have local databases and
make them searchable by others, and have access to databases provided by
others. Making .bib files for specific subject areas via ftp is a small
step in this direction, but much more could be done.

A query that does regexp processing would be helpful.

Looking further ahead, any such system has to have a trust metric built
into it so that it does not fill up with spam entries.