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From Gramps
→Bibliography Data Formats: Add EndNote, CSL, and genealogy programs to data formats
* 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.
* Zotero, Mendeley, and Papers use [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation_Style_Language Citation Style Language (CSL)], an XML schema, at least as an import/export medium. (Zotero uses a relational database for its actual storage.)
* Thompson-Reuters [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EndNote EndNote] is easily the most popular commercial reference management program. It uses a proprietary file format which has nevertheless been reverse-engineered many times so that bibliographies can be easily exchanged between EndNotes and other reference managers.
* Most of the major commercial genealogy programs use a proprietary relational schema for storage of citation data. These fall into two broad categories, binary (similar to GRAMPS's key/value schema, where a citation is composed of several records each having a key/value pair and the program's logic parses the keys to display the citation in the desired format), single-table (where a database tuple is defined which contains the maximum needed fields, each of which is assigned a value according to a parsing scheme in the programs logic), and multiple-table, where different citation types are stored in tables with tuple schema which reflect the requirements of each. As so often in programming, each has costs and benefits with respect to
=== Further Reading ===
John Yates has, with Mills's permission, encoded the elements of the specific examples in Evidence Explained: [http://jytangledweb.org/genealogy/evidencestyle/ Two Computer Ready Parametrizations of "Evidence Style" Historical Sources].
