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Suggestions for improving refbase:
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- Open up the refbase group (aka tagging) mechanism so that groups can be made
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public, group-specific or private.
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- Improved search capabilities which, e.g., allow for 'OR' searches and/or a
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Google-like search syntax. One possible solution might be to offer support for
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the Contextual Query Language (CQL) across the entire interface. More flexible
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handling of accented characters and umlauts would be also desirable.
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- Offer means to auto-detect duplicates on import, link duplicate entries with
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their original ones and allow users to migrate their user-specific data from a
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duplicate record to the original. It would be also nice if duplicate records
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could be hidden from the interface.
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- Improve the installation process so that the web-based installer works with
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more server setups (including installation on shared hosts), and allows
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setting important config options via the web interface.
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- More user-specific and record-specific rights management.
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- Provide additional citation styles, preferably via the use of a plugin
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mechanism which would make it easy to add or edit citation styles. Support for
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the Citation Style Language (CSL) would be desirable.
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- Increase number of supported resource types and allow users to add their own
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types. A hierarchical system with basic fallback types would be desirable.
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- Provide a machine-readable interface (API) that not only allows clients to
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query a refbase database and retrieve results in a structured format, but that
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also allows modification of any database information.
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- Provide better integration with desktop reference managers so that users could
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search an online refbase database from within their desktop application, or
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upload (and eventually synch) records to a refbase server directly from within
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their desktop application.
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- Upon add/edit, offer to auto-fill empty fields based on information available
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in other fields/records/tables or via web services. Eventually, such a system
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could also be used to validate data that were entered/imported by the user.
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- Simplify manual data input by providing record type specific forms. These
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forms could guide a user by only showing (or at least indicating) those fields
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that are required for a particular record type (like journal articles, book
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chapters or whole books).
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- Allow users to upload multiple files per record.
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- Allow users to specify multiple URLs for the same record, and eventually
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provide a customizable system for auto-generation of links (based on the
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record's metadata).
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- Store record identifiers from foreign repositories (e.g. arXiv.org or
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PubMed.gov) in some dedicated field(s), which would allow to easily
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auto-generate links back to these repositories.
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- Implement the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting which would provide (yet
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another) standard way for software to retrieve information from refbase.
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- More localizations, i.e. translations of the refbase interface into other
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languages.
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- Cross-site searches (both through other copies of refbase and through other
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bibliographic databases).
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- Refactor for more code reuse (share more between cite/list/details views,
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etc.), and eventually modularize the code to allow for other RDBMS, custom
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database schemes and/or a plugin mechanism.
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- Provide better interface customization via a templating/skin mechanism and/or
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improved CSS styling.
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- Allow the admin to add any custom fields and/or alter the layout of available
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fields.
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- More embedding of citation metadata in HTML pages in a machine-readable form
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(such as embedded RDF or microformats) which may be processed by clients.
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- Improved export through both revisions to the current MODS XML/bibutils system
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and through adding more native export options which wouldn't require bibutils.
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- User customization: provide a user-specific preferences page where one could
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specify the default view and the default columns that are visible in query
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results or the default fields that are visible in particular search forms.
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- Easier import of bibliographic data from web sources via bookmarklets and/or
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scrapers.
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- Offer a notes/comment system where multiple notes (of unlimited length) would
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be allowed for a particular record and where notes would be searchable, and
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could be made public, group-specific or private.
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- Enable remembering of marked records across different requests.
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- Provide an administrative interface to deleted records.
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A more detailed list of planned feature additions is given at:
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<http://additions.refbase.net>
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