Standards for Specifying Files/URLs in Bibtex

Question

When outputting a bibtex file, Mendeley will put in a "file" and "link" "url" into each entry if they exist in its database.

Is this a standard thing to do, or is Mendeley the only one that does this?

Also, it's format for a file is :<filename>:<type>. Is this also a standard?

Mendeley appears to use an absolute path, but does not put a '/' at the beginning. It also places separators in the filename (like between author/year/journal etc.) within {} in the bibtex file. This seems a bit weird to me, is this a normal thing to do?

I'm writing a program that is making use of these, so I'm wanting to make sure I'm up to scratch on the standards, but I can't easily find the information on this.

Thanks in advance.

Edit: Here's an example from the automatically generated bibtex from Mendeley. Incidentally, I was wrong, it's actually "url" not "link", that was an issue with the parser I'm using.

@article{Castillo2000,
author = {Castillo, P},
doi = {10.1016/S0925-2312(00)00302-7},
file = {:home/user/Documents/Mendeley Desktop/Neurocomputing{\_}2000{\_}Castillo{\_}G-Prop Global optimization of multilayer perceptrons using GAs.pdf:pdf},
issn = {09252312},
journal = {Neurocomputing},
month = {nov},
number = {1-4},
pages = {149--163},
title = {{G-Prop: Global optimization of multilayer perceptrons using GAs}},
url = {http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0925231200003027},
volume = {35},
year = {2000}
}

Answer 1

The original BibTeX did not prescribe any such fields.

biblatex has added many more fields and defined their format very precisely where appropriate (for example, date fields); but it only prescribes a file field (no link field), referring to a local file for the item, with no further details (only mentioning that it is not used by its styles, naturally).

So my answer would be that they are specific to Mendeley.

Can you show us an entry with these two fields?