familysearch / gedcomx-citation Goto Github PK

Citation templates are about displaying citation information in reference notes and bibliographies: They're the province of applications. GedcomX's mission is about passing information, including citation information, between applications, so our concern should be with the citationFields and we should leave citation templates to projects like Citation Style Language.

Consider the following:

1. A citation is a representation of bibliographic metadata.
2. The same bibliographic metadata represented as a list fields is NOT a citation.

If both of these statements are true, I have (at least) the following question:

What is it that GEDCOM X hopes to be able to exchange: bibliographic metadata or citations?

Asked another way, what if the model only supported the exchange of bibliographic metadata and not citations? Would that be sufficient? A model with a bibliographic metadata mechanism and no citation mechanism? It seems that, for some, this is all that is required.

Or what about a hybrid scenario? GEDCOM X already specifies a citation exchange mechanism. If we added a mechanism for representing bibliographic metadata in a fielded, semantic way and left the current citation mechanism in place, but assumed that the bibliographic metadata may only be partial and (in isolation) insufficient to represent a citation, would we have sufficient functionality?

Or is GEDCOM X required to exchange bibliographic metadata AND all the semantical information required to be able to form citations via automation? No. I am not suggesting the transmission of styling or formatting. I am talking about sending enough semantical information that the relationships among the various bibliographic metadata items are well understood (e.g., any hierarchies are apparent, etc.) and automation becomes possible.

The US Library of Congress has developed a widely used standard for storing bibliographic information called MARC, including an XML serialization. This standard is used by, among many others, OCLC, the parents of WorldCat.

Doesn't that meet the needs of GedcomX for specifying the citationField information? Why reinvent the wheel?