citing IVOA standards

[Norman Gray]

Alberto, hello.

On 2008 Jun 16, at 19:26, Alberto Accomazzi wrote:

>>> Our documents don't have bibcodes, therefore they are not listed  
>>> in ADS.
>> Having bibcodes would be nice, I agree.  What do the ADS folk think  
>> about this?
>
> I am certainly not opposed to putting some of these documents in  
> ADS. However, the problem with trying to assign bibcodes to them is  
> that these drafts don't really fit the model of the traditional  
> publications.  To me they look like the documents published by the  
> W3C, whose basic metadata is hard to capture in a single bibcode.   
> For instance, how do you differentiate one document version from  
> another?  It would be much easier if we were talking about IETF RFCs.

According to

[ivoastd]
   Guidelines and Procedures for IVOA Document Standards Management, B  
Hanish, M Dolensdy and M Leoni, IVOA Note, 2004 April 25, http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/Notes/DocStd/Procedures-20040425.html 
  Latest version http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/latest/DocStdProc.html

...the sequence of document version numbers is continuous across the  
various promotions of the document from draft to recommendation, so  
that a version number identifies a document uniquely.  Would a bibcode  
like the following work?

2004ivoa.dstd.1.00H

for v1.00 of this.  Or, for

>> [std:ucd] Sébastien Derriere, Andrea Preite Martinez, and Roy  
>> Williams, editors.
>> UCD (Unified Content Descriptor) — moving to UCD1+. IVOA  
>> Recommendation, 2004. [Online].  Available from: http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/latest/UCD.html 
>>  [cited June 2008].

...which is actually 2005 and v1.10, how about 2005ivoa.ucds.1.10D?   
This is taking 'ivoa.' for the JJJJJ, a suitable (chosen by the  
document coordinator?) four-character abbreviation for the document as  
the VVVV, just '.' for M, and the version number as the PPPP.   
Encoding the WD, Note or Rec status would clearly be possible, but  
probably unnecessary.

> This is certainly one acceptable style.  The W3C documents use this  
> format (as a comparison):
>
> [SRD]
>    SPARQL Query Results XML Format, D. Beckett, J. Broekstra,  
> Editors, W3C Recommendation, 15 January 2008, http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-rdf-sparql-XMLres-20080115/ 
>  Latest version
> http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-XMLres/ .

Both look good.  The '[Online]' and '[last cited]' stuff come from  
either the ISO standard or the APA guidelines, or both, I can't quite  
remember.

> The notable difference is the referencing of the versioned URL as  
> well as the latest one.  It may be worth explicitly mentioning in  
> each IVOA document how it should be cited ("cite as...").

I hadn't thought of that, but yes, including both URLs would be  
valuable, as well as adjusting the document template to include a  
'cite as' section at the top.

All the best,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester