Add citable references

[daissi]

Hi,
So, now the bug is open :-)

Maybe we can start the discussion with a minimal example:

<bibliography>
  <title>GWAMA: software for genome-wide association meta-analysis</title>
  <authors>Reedik Mägi and Andrew P. Morris</authors>
  <date>2010/05/28</date>
  <journal>BMC Bioinformatics</journal>
  <doi>10.1186/1471-2105-11-288</doi>
</bibliography>

What do you think about this?

[ximion]

I actually had something even more basic in mind back then:

<bibliography>
    <citation doi="10.1186/1471-2105-11-288">
        Mägi, R. &amp; Morris, A. P. GWAMA: software for genome-wide association meta-analysis. BMC Bioinformatics 11, 288 (2010).
    </citation>
</bibliography>

What I would like to avoid is having a full-blown BibTeX like reference database in AppStream.

@hughsie @aleixpol What do you think? For a UI having the data neatly split into author/date/journal etc. would be nice, I guess. Question is whether AppStream is the right place to store this information in such detail.
In case we want this, and we want details, I would favor something like this:

<bibliography>
    <citation doi="10.1186/1471-2105-11-288">
        <title>GWAMA: software for genome-wide association meta-analysis</title>
        <authors>Reedik Mägi, Andrew P. Morris</authors>
        <date>2010-05-28</date>
        <journal>BMC Bioinformatics</journal>
    </citation>
</bibliography>

With date being an ISO 8601 date, authors being a simple string with authors ideally being comma-separated (instead of making an authors root node with the individual authors listed as child nodes) and the DOI as citation identifier.

[hughsie]

What do you think?

I don't think this is something that we'd show in a software center, and thus doesn't belong in AppStream. Sorry.

[ximion]

@hughsie From being in science myself, I know that people will actually (try to) search for that in software centers, and it might be a useful feature for dedicated tools to display the right software for a publication. At least the former would make it relevant for AppStream because it falls in the "information relevant to the user to decide whether they want to install the application" category that I use to determine what belongs into AS.

However admittedly this is a fringe feature that's useful for a really small amount of people, and AppStream really isn't the right place for a bibliography reference list. So, I really haven't made up my mind on this yet (which is why when this was originally requested on the mailinglist the discussion kind of faded, so I'm glad that we have an open ticket for this now).

[hughsie]

If they're searching for it, it's a surely?

[ximion]

@hughsie A "surely" for adding that feature?

[hughsie]

Gahh sorry, my phone ate the formatting. I meant "it's a <keyword> surely"