We've had problems with RIS on a recent project. Although there is a
specification (http://www.refman.com/support/risformat_intro.asp), it is (I
feel) lacking enough rigour to ever be implemented consistently. The most
common issue in the wild that I've seen is use of different tags for the
same information (which the specification does not nail down enough to know
when each should be used):

Use of TI or T1 for primary title
Use of AU or A1 for primary author
Use of UR, L1 or L2 to link to 'full text'

Perhaps more significantly the specification doesn't include any field
specifically for a DOI, but despite this EndNote (owned by ISI ResearchSoft,
who are also responsible for the RIS format specification) includes the DOI
in a DO field in its RIS output - not to specification.

Owen

On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 9:17 AM, Jakob Voss <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hi
>
> it's funny how quickly you vote against BibTeX, but at least it is a format
> that is frequently used in the wild to create citations. If you call BibTeX
> undocumented and garbage then how do you call MARC which is far more
> difficult to make use of?
>
> My assumption was that there is a specific use case for bibliographic data
> in twitter annotations:
>
> I. Identifiy publication => this can *only* be done seriously with
> identifiers like ISBN, DOI, OCLCNum, LCCN etc.
>
> II. Deliver a citation => use a citation-oriented format (BibTeX, CSL, RIS)
>
> I was not voting explicitly for BibTeX but at least there is a large
> community that can make use of it. I strongly favour CSL (
> http://citationstyles.org/) because:
>
> - there is a JavaScript CSL-Processor. JavaScript is kind of a punishment
> but it is the natural environment for the Web 2.0 Mashup crowd that is going
> to implement applications that use Twitter annotations
>
> - there are dozens of CSL citation styles so you can display a citation in
> any way you want
>
> As Ross pointed out RIS would be an option too, but I miss the easy open
> source tools that use RIS to create citations from RIS data.
>
> Any other relevant format that I know (Bibont, MODS, MARC etc.) does not
> aim at identification or citation at the first place but tries to model the
> full variety of bibliographic metadata. If your use case is
>
> III. Provide semantic properties and connections of a publication
>
> Then you should look at the Bibliographic Ontology. But III does *not*
> "just subsume" usecase II. - it is a different story that is not beeing told
> by normal people but only but metadata experts, semantic web gurus, library
> system developers etc. (I would count me to this groups). If you want such
> complex data then you should use other systems but Twitter for data exchange
> anyway.
>
> A list of CSL metadata fields can be found at
>
> http://citationstyles.org/downloads/specification.html#appendices
>
> and the JavaScript-Processor (which is also used in Zotero) provides more
> information for developers: http://groups.google.com/group/citeproc-js
>
> Cheers
> Jakob
>
> P.S: An example of a CSL record from the JavaScript client:
>
> {
> "title": "True Crime Radio and Listener Disenchantment with Network
> Broadcasting, 1935-1946",
>  "author": [ {
>    "family": "Razlogova",
>    "given": "Elena"
>  } ],
>  "container-title": "American Quarterly",
>  "volume": "58",
>  "page": "137-158",
>  "issued": { "date-parts": [ [2006, 3] ] },
>  "type": "article-journal"
>
> }
>
>
> --
> Jakob Voß <[log in to unmask]>, skype: nichtich
> Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) / Common Library Network
> Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1, 37073 Göttingen, Germany
> +49 (0)551 39-10242, http://www.gbv.de
>



-- 
Owen Stephens
Owen Stephens Consulting
Web: http://www.ostephens.com
Email: [log in to unmask]