MongoBibDesk

This is an experimental project to host bibliographic data in MongoDB.

Some notes

1. Goal: to mirror BibDesk bibliographies onto a MongoDB server.
2. Why? Hosting bibliographic data in a convenient database may make machine-learning and linguistic analysis of an academic corpus more convenient. pyarxiv is a good example. It also paves the way to a cloud-based, BibDesk-integrated, experience. Put BibDesk in the browser? Put BibDesk on the iPad? Yes we can.
3. Why integrate with BibDesk? BibDesk's native datastore is pure BibTeX, which makes it easy to integrate in an academic publishing workflow. This project could use any library that parses BibTeX, but frankly, a lot of them crashed in my cursory tests. BibDesk has a robust---forgiving---parser and has nice extras, like attachments for PDFs. In principle, the BibDeskInterface class could be generalized for anyone's BibTeX parser.
4. How do you integrate with BibDesk? I use py-appscript, the Python-AppleScript bridge. Its surprisingly nice to work with.
5. Why Python? It rocks.
6. Why MongoDB? Its schema-less, easy to use, and easy to query.

Dependencies

• Python 2.x
• a running MongoDB server on the localhost
• PyMongo
• py-appscript

Contact

Created an maintained by Jonathan Sick (jonathansick /at/ mac /dot/ com).