Introducing BibYAML

BibYAML stands for Bibliographic YAML, and aims to be a new standard for managing, formatting and storing bibliographies. Inheriting the advantages of BibTeX and YAML, it provides human and machine readable bibliographic records that can populate your database and documents. Let’s see how it works!

As a simple tool I provide a naive BibTeX parser for converting between the two formats. It can be accessed at bib2yaml.appspot.com.

Imagine the hypotetical BibTeX bibliography below:

@BOOK{Book-Title,
    author    = "Author's Name",
    publisher = "Fancy Publisher",
    title     = "The very long book title even with new line 
    characters",
    year      =  2012,
    isbn      = "1234567890",
}

@PROCEEDINGS{Conference-XYZ,
    editor    = {Awesome Editor},
    title     = {Proceedings of the Xth Conference on XYZ},
    year      = {2012},
    month     = july,
}

the resultant BibYAML would be:

BOOK:
    - name: Book-Title
    author: Author's Name
    publisher: Fancy Publisher
    title: The very long book title even with new line characters
    year: 2012
    isbn: 1234567890

PROCEEDINGS:
    - name: Conference-XYZ
    editor: Awesome Editor
    title: Proceedings of the Xth Conference on XYZ
    year: 2012
    month: july

This tool was tested for a limited set of BibTeX entries, but it seems to be working fine. It looks like the simpler BibTeX parser developed so far, though. The idea then is to start using BibYAML to populate databases or documents. Since YAML is really easy to parse, and there are YAML parsers for virtually all programming languages in use, there are obvious advantages in using it. I hope you like the idea!