This git repository contains a specification of BEACON link dump format to be prepared for publication as Request for Comment (RFC).

General information about BEACON, its application and a preliminary specification can be found in the German Wikipedia at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BEACON/Format.

BEACON format

BEACON is a simple format to serialize a number of uniform links. There is a serialization as raw Unicode and a serialization in XML. BEACON was primarily used to collect mappings between authority files and information resources in libraries and related organizations.

Illustration

BEACON defines a link dump as set of links from a source database to a target database. Several parts can be described by meta fields (in uppercase):

The final set of meta fields is still to be discussed.

How to modify this specification

The specification of BEACON link dump format is being prepared in this public git repository, located at https://github.com/gbv/beaconspec. The specification is written in Pandoc Markdown syntax in the file beacon.md. Additional parts are included in the file appendices.md, rfctemplate.xml, and bibliographic references in the directory ref. To compile the specification in RFC style there is a Makefile. To create a snapshot in HTML and TXT format you need:

• Pandoc,
• an XSLT transformator (xsltproc),
• xml2rfc version 2.

To install at Ubuntu Linux with Python, call:

sudo apt-get install pandoc xsltproc xml2rfc
sudo pip install xml2rfc

To further install pandoc2rfc after cloning the repository you must call:

git submodule update --init

You can then modify beacon.md, appendices.md, rfctemplate.xml and create a nice HTML version by simply invoking make.

Snapshots and recent changes

Sources and recent changes can be found at http://github.com/gbv/beaconspec. A snapshots in HTML formats is at http://gbv.github.com/beaconspec/beacon.html.

Additional files

This repository also includes BEACON icons (img/) and tools to process BEACON (tools/).