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6 <h1>XMP metadata support in JabRef</h1>
8 <p>XMP is a standard created by Adobe Systems for storing
9 metadata (data about data) in files. An well known example for
10 metadata are MP3 tags, which can be used to describe artist,
11 album and song name of a MP3 file. Adding metadata to MP3 helps
12 other people to identify the songs correctly independent of
13 file-name and can provide means for software (MP3 players for
14 instance) to sort and group songs.</p>
16 <p>With XMP-support the JabRef team tries to bring the
17 advantages of metadata to the world of reference managers. You
18 can now choose to "Write XMP" metadata in the General Tab of
19 JabRef, which will put all the Bibtex information into the PDF.
20 If you then email this PDF to a collegue she can just drag the
21 file into JabRef and all information that you entered will be
26 <p>To use the XMP-feature in JabRef you can do the
30 <li>To <b>import a single annotated PDF-file</b> that
31 contains XMP you can select "File -> Import into...
32 -> XMP-annotated PDF" or drag the file into the main
35 <li>To <b>write the bibliographic information to the
36 associated PDF</b> do the following: Double click the entry
37 in the main view, go to the "General" tab and click on
40 <li>If you want <b>to annotate all the PDFs in a given
41 database</b> you can select "Tools -> Write XMP for
44 <li>To verify if it worked you can open the PDF in Adobe
45 Acrobat and select "File -> Document Properties ->
46 Additional Metadata -> Advanced". In the tree to the
47 right you should see an entry called
48 "http://purl.org/net/bibteXMP". This works only with Adobe
49 Acrobat, not with Adobe Reader.</li>
51 <li>If you don't have Adobe Acrobat, you can use
52 <i>pdfinfo</i> instead in order to see the XMP metadata.
53 <i>pdfinfo</i> is part of Xpdf
54 (<code>www.foolabs.com/xpdf</code>) and Poppler
55 (<code>http://poppler.freedesktop.org</code>).</li>
57 <li style="list-style: none">
58 <div style="margin-left: 2em">
59 <h2>BibteXmp Fileformat</h2>
61 <p>XMP uses a subset of the Resource Description
62 Framework (RDF) to store data. For JabRef a new
63 metadata format is used which maps very closely to
64 BibTeX. Basically all fields and values are turned
65 into nodes of an XML document. Only authors and
66 editors are stored as rdf:Seq-structures, so users
67 of the data can skip the splitting on 'and's. All
68 strings and crossrefs will be resolved in the
71 <p>The following easy minimal schema is used:</p>
74 <li>The BibTeX-key is stored as
75 <code>bibtexkey</code>.</li>
77 <li>The type of the BibTeX-entry is stored as
78 <code>entrytype</code>.</li>
80 <li><code>author</code> and <code>editor</code>
81 are encoding as <code>rdf:Seq</code>s where the
82 individual authors are represented as
83 <code>rdf:li</code>s.</li>
85 <li>All other fields are saved using their
86 field-name as is.</li>
91 <p>The following is an example of the mapping</p>
93 @INPROCEEDINGS{CroAnnHow05,
94 author = {Crowston, K. and Annabi, H. and Howison, J. and Masango, C.},
95 title = {Effective work practices for floss development: A model and propositions},
96 booktitle = {Hawaii International Conference On System Sciences (HICSS)},
99 timestamp = {2006.05.29},
100 url = {http://james.howison.name/publications.html}
102 </pre>will be transformed into
104 <rdf:Description xmlns:bibtex="http://jabref.sourceforge.net/bibteXMP/"
105 bibtex:bibtexkey="CroAnnHow05"
107 bibtex:title="Effective work practices for floss development: A model and propositions"
108 bibtex:owner="oezbek"
109 bibtex:url="http://james.howison.name/publications.html"
110 bibtex:booktitle="Hawaii International Conference On System Sciences (HICSS)"
111 bibtex:timestamp="2006.05.29">
112 <bibtex:author>
114 <rdf:li>K. Crowston</rdf:li>
115 <rdf:li>H. Annabi</rdf:li>
116 <rdf:li>J. Howison</rdf:li>
117 <rdf:li>C. Masango</rdf:li>
119 </bibtex:author>
120 <bibtex:entrytype>Inproceedings</bibtex:entrytype>
121 </rdf:Description>
124 <p>Beware of the following caveats if you trying to
128 <li>In RDF attribute-value pairs can also be
129 expressed as nodes and vice versa.</li>
134 <h2>Related Links:</h2>
136 <p>Some links about XMP and annotating PDFs:</p>
140 <a href="http://freelancepropaganda.com/themp/">
141 James Howison's blog "Themp---Managing Academic
142 Papers like MP3s"</a></li>
145 <a href="http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/09/22/xmp.html">
146 XML.com article about XMP</a></li>
148 <li><a href="http://jempbox.org">JempBox</a>
149 and <a href="http://pdfbox.org">PDFBox</a> by
150 Ben Litchfield are the Jaba libraries used to
151 access the PDFs and the metadata stream.</li>
154 <a href="http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/ubb.x/a/tpc/f/8300945231/m/377001889631">
155 Good thread on ArsTechnica discussing the
156 management of PDFs.</a></li>
159 <a href="http://www.adobe.com/devnet/xmp/pdfs/xmp_specification.pdf">
160 Adobe XMP Specification</a></li>