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