Recently, I am doing my masterthesis about citation. I have worked in last two day about CiteProc and written a little introduction about it.

 

CiteProc Introduction

1.     What is CiteProc?

CiteProc is a part of the OpenOffice Bibliographic Project under the project of OpenOffice.org (OOo)[1][2]. The OOo team wants to provide an opportunity for the creation and distribution of opensource bibliographic style definitions that are not specific to a particular word-processor or bibliographic package. Base on this idea, they want to implement Bibliographic table and citation formatting using a process called CiteProc.[3]

CiteProc is a comprehensive solution for bibliographic and citation formatting. It consists of an easy-to-use XML citation style language (CSL), and the XSLT code to format documents based on them. CiteProc is a working proof-of-concept for the formatting functionality and was originally authored in XSLT 2.0. Some working example of the CiteProc has been implemented by the OOo.

 

2.     How does it work?

 

Just as discussed in the part 1, CiteProc is a process for creation of bibliographic table and citation formatting independent of word-processor. The Figure 1 shows an overview of CiteProc.

 

Figure 1: CiteProc Overview

 

CiteProc communicate with document and bibliography database. On the side of the database, an xml database is normally required. For example: eXist xml database.[4] The MODS bibliographic data of the document should be stored in this database. On the other side, the document will be operated by a certain word-processor.( For example: OpenOffice. ) And this word-processor will interact with CiteProc only when a new reference is added to the document, the Bibliography is generated or the style is changed.[5] With each change or generation, the CiteProc will convert the formats between xml and the local format of the word-processor according to its CiteProc Style sheets and produce its formatted reference table. All the creation and the changes from the CiteProc will be returned to the Bibliographic Data & Formated Citation strings in the document, so that the changes could be displayed in the document. And each change in the Citation strings will be updated by the xml database.

 

Figure 2: CiteProc Writer Interaction

 

For using it, the CiteProc must be integrated to word-processor. It means, if we want to use CiteProc to manage our bibliography in word 2003, we must write a interface for word 2003 to integrate the CiteProc into it.

 

---