Managing docbook XML bibliography with refdb

I’ve build my professional webpages using Docbook XML Website.

I include Docbook XML (article) papers inside the website, and didn’t like the way the bibliographies were produced using standard elements. It seems including bibliography in webpages was not a priority. And writing each biblioentry as a entry is a bit of a pain.

I’ve then tried and adopted refdb, which allows management of all bibliographic entries in a database (edited as RIS format, for instance, and managed thrgough a nice emacs mode, btw), and the generation of docbook XML bibliomixed fragments, which contain the bibliography. The order and appearance of the bibliographic entries can be customised through a set of “stylesheets” defined with the Citeref DTD inclued in RefDB.

The whole thing is a bit tricky as lacks extensive documentation, and required some adaptation of the XSL parsing : the existing examples and scripts in RefDB will produce some (X)HTML or XSL/FO, but I needed to produce some docbook Website in the end… but I managed to hack a couple things in the XSL parsers and Makefile, and there it is. You may find such an output bibliography at the bottom of this page.

There’s still a little thing missing in RefDB for me : the ability to get the RIS citation key in the output using CiteStyle, but that’s already much better than managing things on my own in Docbook source.

I’ll try to document this a bit better in the future, but I hope it has already raised some interest on your side. In the meantime, I have to convert all previous manual bibliographies to the new system.