DOCBOOK-APPS: Bibliography management/BibTex equivalent

[Bernd Kreimeier <bk at oddworld dot com>]

I used to use LaTeX article style and BibTex with bibdb-like 
tools during my time at university. I am now using DocBook 
for publications, and have to find a comparable solution. My 
first two attempts at using the DocBook make me believe I am 
missing something fundamental here. 

I do not want to rely on the bibliomixed etc. "cooked" elements 
as they seem to be a procedural markup fallback for breakdown of 
biblioentry?

biblioentry seems very different from the BibTex approach, and it 
seems that the default stylesheets suffer from that. BibTex 
restricts which fields are required or optional for a specific 
type of entry, and consequently rendering the reference to a 
given (journal) style might be simplified?

Has anybody created DocBook elements equivalent to BibTeX, and a 
transformation to DocBook biblioentry? And/or a conversion from 
BibTex DB files to DocBook? That would make it easier to maintain 
references as a BibTex-like SGML/XML collection.

Specifically: comments on:
  http://refdb.sourceforge.net/
  http://canvas.gnome.org:65348/pybliographer/
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/jreferences/
  http://www.bitjungle.com/~bibtex/
  http://carol.wins.uva.nl/~zegerh/bibteXML/


However, loosing the information conveyed by the BibTex elements 
might make it (unnecessarily?) hard to maintain stylesheets that 
render in conformance with standard citation styles. Has a
DocBook module with BibTex-equivalent elements been discussed
and rejected?

                                                       b.