Saturday, February 6, 2010

LibRIS: A PHP library for RIS parsing and writing

Once again I am working diligently on managing my bibliography and related resources. That means... time to create some new tools.

Today, I released the source code for an RIS parser and writer. The project, LibRIS is hosted on GitHub.

RIS (Research Information Systems) is a file format for exchanging information about reference sources. Journal articles, art works, books... metadata for these can all be expressed in RIS format. And most common citation formats need no more information than that found within an RIS record.

I released an "early access release" today. The format is basic enough that the reader/writer should already be relatively stable. I am using it in a new version of the fabled Lantern package, which is being written on Fortissimo.