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→Background: Add bibliography formats
For a computer program like GRAMPS, the goals should be to collect all of the necessary information noted above in a way that is easy for users to enter, to support evidence analysis and comparison to create "proof arguments", and to link those proof arguments to the genealogical conclusions in the database.
GRAMPS's present data structure maps directly to the SOUR and SOUR_CITATION structures in the [http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~pmcbride/gedcom/55gctoc.htm GEDCOM5.5] standard, and the source entry form maps directly to the data structure. While it's possible to cram everything needed for a good citation into those three fields, parsing the information back out to actually create a citation is unnecessarily challenging.
=== Bibliography Data Formats ===
* [www.bibtex.org BibTeX] has emerged as a common format (for interchange at least) among bibliography and reference management tools and offers a much richer set of available fields.
* The U.S. Library of Congress has published the [http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/ Metadata Object Description Schema], an XML schema for encoding library catalog data. That wouldn't be very interesting except that [http://www.scripps.edu/~cdputnam/software/bibutils/ BibUtils] uses it as an intermediate format for converting between a variety of bibliography file standards.
