org.biojava.bibliography.package.html Maven / Gradle / Ivy
Bibliographic search and citation are central to all scholarly and
research activities. Within the domain of life sciences research,
bibliographic citation is of particular importance for annotation of
large bodies of experimentally developed and computationally derived
data and the rapidly increasing corpus of research literature makes
efficient and effective bibliographic searches increasingly critical.
The relevant literature may include traditional (hardcopy) research
journal publications, books, theses, reviews and the like. Recent
developments require researchers and scholars to use and cite a wider
variety of sources, including database records, electronically
published journals, World Wide Web sites and multimedia works.
While several standards exist for the representation of bibliographic
citations, some of them are not readily adapted to newer forms of
publication, or they are not designed to be easily extendible and
customizable as the current needs require. Also, there is no common
set of interfaces for distributed object implementations of
bibliographic servers.
This was the motivation for proposing, defending, standardizing and
finally implementing a Bibliographic Query Service, a service enabling
access to heterogeneous bibliographic databases and the development of
interoperable clients that make use of this access.
The data structures and interfaces included in this package define an
interoperable framework for bibliographic searches. A reference
implementation was developed at European Bioinformatics Institute as
an open source project
OpenBQS, providing an
access to the MEDLINE, a major bibliographic repository in the life
sciences research domain, but not limited to it.
The package consists of three parts:
- Few data types representing a bibliographic citation
(see class BibRef),
- An interface defining methods for connecting to a bibliographic
repository, querying it and finally retrieving citations from it
(see interface BibRefQuery), and
- A supporting interface defining mainly access to the
bibliographic controlled vocabularies and few other utilities
(see interface BibRefSupport).