The data structures and interfaces included in this package define an interoperable framework for bibliographic searches.

Bibliographic search and citation are central to all scholarly and research activities. Within the domain of life sciences research, bibliographic citation is of particular importance for annotation of large bodies of experimentally developed and computationally derived data and the rapidly increasing corpus of research literature makes efficient and effective bibliographic searches increasingly critical.

The relevant literature may include traditional (hardcopy) research journal publications, books, theses, reviews and the like. Recent developments require researchers and scholars to use and cite a wider variety of sources, including database records, electronically published journals, World Wide Web sites and multimedia works.

While several standards exist for the representation of bibliographic citations, some of them are not readily adapted to newer forms of publication, or they are not designed to be easily extendible and customizable as the current needs require. Also, there is no common set of interfaces for distributed object implementations of bibliographic servers.

This was the motivation for proposing, defending, standardizing and finally implementing a Bibliographic Query Service, a service enabling access to heterogeneous bibliographic databases and the development of interoperable clients that make use of this access.

The data structures and interfaces included in this package define an interoperable framework for bibliographic searches. A reference implementation was developed at European Bioinformatics Institute as an open source project OpenBQS, providing an access to the MEDLINE, a major bibliographic repository in the life sciences research domain, but not limited to it.

The package consists of three parts:

- Few data types representing a bibliographic citation (see class BibRef),
- An interface defining methods for connecting to a bibliographic repository, querying it and finally retrieving citations from it (see interface BibRefQuery), and
- A supporting interface defining mainly access to the bibliographic controlled vocabularies and few other utilities (see interface BibRefSupport).