[referencer] Translation and Keywords-to-Tags conversion

[Frederik Elwert]

Am Freitag, den 25.05.2007, 15:10 +0100 schrieb John Spray:
> On Fri, 2007-05-25 at 12:10 +0200, Frederik Elwert wrote:
> I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there's been some duplicated
> effort here -- over the last week or so a German translation has been
> done on launchpad.net, which we recently switched to for translating
> referencer.  Joachim Sauer did that one, perhaps you two could
> collaborate.

Oh, I realised that too late - but I haven't spent too much time on it,
so it's no problem...

> > Until now, I added a Keywords field to my BibTeX entries to have some
> > kind of tag support. That pybliographer doesn't support tags directly
> > was the main reason for me to look for alternatives. Since the Keywords
> > don't get converted into Tags during import, I wrote a little python
> > script that takes a freshly imported reflib-file and adds tags according
> > to the (space-separated) Keywords-list. I don't know if this is useful
> > for anybody else, but now that I wrote it, I can share it anyway.
> 
> Are these keywords space separated, comma separated or what?  Could you
> send a sample bibtex file (off-list if you prefer)?

The keywords are space-separated. My former bibliography tool added
keywords like that, but I had preferred comma-separated keywords...

A typical entry looks like this:

@Book{Bahro59,
  Author         = "Rudolf Bahro",
  Title          = "Logik der Rettung. Wer kann die Apokalypse aufhalten?
                   Ein Versuch {\"u}ber die Grundlagen {\"o}kologischer Politik",
  Publisher      = "Edition Weitbrecht",
  Keywords       = "Apokalypse Kritik Politik",
  Address        = "Stuttgart, Wien",
  abstract       = "Gr{\"u}ner Fundamentalismus - was ist das?",
  year           = 1987
}

I don't know if anybody else uses the keywords field like this. It is no
real standard field anyway, although it's a quite common extension. But
I haven't found any specification about the keyword separator.

> > I have around 150 tags, since I used keywords quite a lot to structure
> > my bibliography. This might be quite much and not really what tagging in
> > referencer was made for. But I'd like to share some ideas that would
> > make dealing with tags in referencer much easier for me. I don't know if
> > it would help other people, too, so maybe this is just not the scope for
> > referencer.
> > 
> >       * Alphabetic ordering of tags. Scrolling through a list of 150
> >         tags is really horror when there is no ordering at all.
> 
> Agreed, sorting the tags is already on the todo list.

Ah, good!

> I'm a bit surprised that you have quite such a large number of tags: is
> this a really massive bibtex file, or do you just tag very finely?

Indeed I tag quite finely. I have about 250 entries in my file, and I
add tags for topic, used methods, used theory, but I also add tags for
my personal projects, so that I easily find all literature I used for my
thesis or something. The idea is that I can easily find literature that
describes religious fundamentalism (topic) with a rational choice
approach (theory) and uses a specific method, etc.

> >       * Text-field for adding tags to a document. I'd really like the
> >         preferences dialogue for a document to have a simple text field
> >         into which I can type the appropriate tags as a comma-separated
> >         list. When dealing with many tags, this is much easier for
> >         frequently used tags then searching the list.
> 
> Nice idea.  The UI for tagging is undergoing some rethinking on my end
> at the moment, I'm thinking to move more in the direction of a tag
> browser in the main window, then add/remove tags in the context menu for
> each document.  A text field for tags in the properties dialog would
> complement this nicely.

That sounds good. By the way, I also like the fancy tag thing you sent
through the list. 

> 
> >       * Ad-hoc hierarchy in tag list. This is quite a big feature
> >         request, but a really useful feature, I think. Some applications
> >         that support tags (like ccmixter.org) allow selecting more then
> >         one tag to refine the selection (currently referencer behaves
> >         opposite: When you select several tags, it performs a OR search,
> >         not an AND search). Additionally, only tags that appear together
> >         with the selected tag(s) are shown.
> >         In a desktop app like Referencer, this maybe could be achieved
> >         as an ad-hoc tree-view. Tags should be expandable and show tags
> >         that exist together with them as children. A bibliographical
> >         tool that I once used hat a feature similar to this, and I
> >         really liked it:
> >         http://www.winload.de/bilder/screenshots/47365/Bibliographix.gif
> 
> I believe that epiphany does something similar: I guess the algorithm
> does something like recognising that certain tags are only found along
> with others in order to recognise a hierarchy.  Could get quite
> complicated, I think there would have to be some threshold (~30 tags?)
> where this behaviour kicked in.

I agree, this would be a quite large feature extension and would make
sense with a larger number of tags. But then it offers great flexibility
and allows for searches like I mentioned above, i.e., to refine your tag
selection when one tag just has too many hits.

But if it's just me who uses tags as extensively, it definitively not
worth the work... ;-) It would be good to find out if others would have
a benefit from such a feature.

Now I'm just excited to see what the future will bring for referencer,
and I wanted to thank you for the great work so far!

Cheers,
Frederik