Add reference field to YAML input files

[ischoegl]

Abstract

A reference field would clarify the provenance of YAML files beyond what is included in the decription field, which is automatically generated from chemkin input (but is missing for many YAML files in 2.5.0a3). An implementation could use a single BibTeX entry as input, which is reformatted into YAML, e.g.

reference:
  - title: GRI-Mech 3.0
  - author: [G. P. Smith, D. M. Golden, M. Frenklach, N. W. Moriarty, B. Eiteneer, M. Goldenberg, C. T. Bowman, R. K. Hanson, S. Song, W. C. Gardiner, Jr., V. V. Lissianski, Z. Qin]
  - year: 1999
  - howpublished: http://www.me.berkeley.edu/gri_mech/

Motivation

While some input files (e.g. gri30.yaml) do use the description tag, others do not (e.g. nDodecane_Reitz.yaml, h2o2.yaml, nasa.yaml, gri30_highT.yaml). In many cases, it is not clear where input originates (i.e. are they peer-reviewed? is this just a file compiled for demonstration purposes?)

If available, a chemkin header block does not use consistent content. Content pulled from a BibTeX entry would resolve this shortcoming.

Describe the need for the proposed change:

This feature request proposes a mechanism to address Cantera/cantera#339; further: the BibTeX comment field can be used to add context.

Possible Solutions

The proposed solution would be to generate information from a single BibTeX entry, which is passed as an input file via a --bibtex= option to ck2yaml. The BibTeX fields can be converted to yaml fields with little effort.

References

• Adding citation to the chem input file in the data folder cantera#339
• Discussion of comment field in [WIP] Commit yaml files cantera#768

[bryanwweber]

I think this would probably be a good idea. Fortunately, I don't think anything has to change within Cantera to enable this, the field just has to be added to the relevant files (other than adding the ck2yaml interface).

A note from our experience with PyKED... Sometimes (most times?) a single reference isn't sufficient, so we need a way for this to be able to handle that case.

[ischoegl]

Sometimes (most times?) a single reference isn't sufficient

Thanks for this feedback; it is easily addressed (e.g. use BibTeX’s citation labels for each entry)