The prototype system constructed during the Phase I study successfully demonstrated the feasibility of a user-friendly, flexible Bibliographic Citation Generator running on the IBM PC/XT. This system is intended to largely automate the generation of correctly formatted bibliographic citations from user databases of bibliographic information. The Phase II project will fully develop this prototype and extend it to a complete set of software tools both for the automatic generation of bibliographic citations and for the acquisition of and maintenance of the necessary bibliographic information. The key tools used in building the prototype, and which will be central in the further development, are the Prolog programming language together with the notion of Expert Grammar Rules for the specification of input record formats and output citation formats. The prototype included user interfaces for constructing these Expert Grammar Rules and compiling them to executable Prolog code for citation generation. Beyond fully developing these components, the Phase II project will add components for (1) direct interfaces to PC database systems, (2) downloading bibliographic information from on-line information utilities to the users' database, (3) specifying appropriate database configurations, (4) acquisition of abbreviated bibliographic references from word processed documents to create the necessary citation elements.
