Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2008 - (Page 30)

D02gray_p5ma.qxp 12/7/07 2:25 PM Page 30 Core Technology Matthew Curry and Jeff Gray BibPort: Creating Bibliographic References Mining bibliographic citations and Microsoft VSTO Bibliographic software such as BibTeX and EndNote help you construct customized databases of literature references and manage the citation and formatting of a list of references, making the insertion of new citations into documents a seamless operation. A database of citations serves as the repository for each of these tools and can record all pertinent information about specific publications—author names, title, publication type, and date of publication. However, when a large collection of articles already exists, the task of creating the database of references can be daunting. Manually typing or copying-and-pasting from existing documents into databases can be tedious and error prone. And with existing bibliographic software, there is no prepackaged solution to assist in automating the initial manual entry of references into the database. In this article, we present BibPort, an automated tool that extracts relevant information from a set of legacy documents to create a database of bibliographic references using Word 2007’s reference-management facilities. In the context of bibliographic text mining, this article is a case study in using Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) (msdn .microsoft.com/office/understanding/vsto) in combination with Visual Studio 2008 and Word 2007. Similarly, an export manager serves as a back-end for multiple export engines for citation database formats. Input/output processes are modularized such that any export engine is able to understand the output of any parser. Matthew is a Ph.D. student and Jeff an associate professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of AlabamaBirmingham. They can be contacted at curryml@cis.uab .edu and gray@cis.uab.edu, respectively. Parsing a Citation Distinguishing the particular type of a reference—a journal, conference paper, or book—within a specific citation format requires an inference to be made based on textual cues appearing in each entry. The inference of the reference type can be extended to differentiate between numerous citation formats. When possible, users may be consulted to disambiguate the conflicts resulting from typographical errors. Design Principles for BibPort Many organizations have specific formatting styles for bibliographic citation; the IEEE, ACM, APA, and MLA. A cursory web search yields several dozen citation styles in widespread use. Therefore, an important BibPort design goal addresses the flexibility needed to work with multiple citation formats. BibPort is not hard-coded to a specific format; new citation formats can be added by supplying new parsers. Furthermore, while individual bibliographic-management tools tend to have their own format, the choice of database format is flexible within BibPort. BibPort has a plug-in architecture that has a parser manager as a front-end to any number of citation formats. 30 Dr. Dobb’s Journal l www.ddj.com l February 2008 Ambiguity in a Typical Reference List Entry Figure 1 is a typical entry in a reference list formatted in APA style. In this entry, the author “A. Provenzale,” has a paper entitled “Page Swapping is Bad. What You Should Know” that has been accepted by “Memory Management and You: Novel Memory Management Techniques.” A noticeable problem occurs in this entry due to the title containing two sentences. It is impossible for the parser to determine where the specific title ends and journal name begins. Underlining the journal name is therefore crucial to the successful interpretation continued on page 34 http://msnd.microsoft.com/office/understanding/vsto http://msnd.microsoft.com/office/understanding/vsto http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2008 Contents Hmmmm Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer’s Notebook South American Software Development Conversations Inside Visual Studio 2008 BibPort: Creating Bibliographic References Continuous LINQ The ZK Framework Static Testing C++ Code The Agile Edge Effective Concurrency Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2008

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