Introduction

The Cite schema offers a rich namespaced markup language for citations. Cite builds off of citation improvements recently added to DocBook, but is both more general, as well as suitable for use in GUI applications like office suites. Designed to be embedded in other XML document formats such as WordML and OpenOffice (for which is has been formally approved for inclusion), Cite is flexible enough to encode citations in demanding fields such as the humanities and law.

Flexibility and Precision

Unlike existing solutions, Cite offers support for full semantic coding of citations to the standards necessary in demanding fields like history or law. Examples such as the following are thus fully supported in a standardized XML representation:

(Doe, 1999: page 3, line 2)
(Smith, 2000; see also Jones, 2001)

Citations are divided between a cite:citation-source element that contains a pointer to the bibliographic record and the semantic coding of how to render it, and a cite:citation-body element that contains the formatted citation for rendering in WYSIWYG applications.

Such a design allows the formatting to be easily regenerated based on a different style. For example, it is feasible to allow seamless switching back-and-forth between radically different styles. One can start authoring using a footnote-based style, and then later switch to an in-text style with the simple change of a style option. The formatting is all automatically regenerated without user intervetion, a feature that commercial products like Endnote do not support.