BibSonomy Blog

Release 2.0.21

2012-01-25T18:42:00.004+01:00

What day is today? Right, last wednesday of the month, which means... BibSonomy release day! After the christmas break, we're happy to announce the new BibSonomy is called 2.0.21. Besides the usual internal cleanups and optimizations, the following new things were contained:

A new layout, according strictly to the German norm DIN-1505
Discussion pages for groups
Worked-over document upload facility (in-place directly at each entry)
O-auth support for our API
Very cool preview images for uploaded documents

In the upcoming weeks, we'll explain those features in greater detail. Apart from that, we added the following new scrapers:

ATS (PATS, AJRCCM, AJRCMB)
NEJM

and repaired the folowing ones:

AGU
OpenRepository
WorldCat
OPAC
AandA

As usual, we're always grateful for feedback, suggestions, or basically anything which comes from you as our valued users!! Happy Tagging,

Dominik

Best Season's Greetings from the BibSonomy Team!

2011-12-24T10:33:00.003+01:00

Scientists usually don't believe in mystical things like elves - but in fact, we can't be 100% sure if they aren't dancing right now within our institute, because actually (not surprisingly) there isn't anybody there right now :) As you see, we're on a leave, and we hope you are too - wishing you a great Christmas time, and a good start into a successfull new year 2012. We will do our best to keep on providing a good BibSonomy service for you, and hope that we keep on getting great feedback and suggestions from you how we can do things better!

For the meantime - if you ever wanted to locate Santa Clause on Google Maps - here you can :)

Feature of the Week: BibSonomy's new Look

2011-12-11T10:23:00.007+01:00

The days at the end of the year are usually a good time to look back on the past 12 months and to take a look ahead to ideas, tasks and challenges for the approaching new year. This week's post is dedicated to the latter and the bigger goal we have set for BibSonomy in 2012 is to give it a new, revised and modern design.

Since its birth in 2005 BibSonomy has been enriched with new features to facilitate and ease the organization of bookmarks and publications, the social interaction with other scientists or getting up to date with the state of the art in science. For some time now, we've felt, that BibSonomy could use a fresh look and a new, reorganized navigational structure, to keep all this functionality together while still being a lightweight and easy-to-use system.

With all that in mind, earlier this year, we started two initiatives: The first one was to set up a project together with our University's department for Human-Machine Systems Engineering. In that project students from different disciplines were asked to use BibSonomy (as first timers) for several tasks that belong the the system's core (like storing and retrieving publications, searching for them or for other users). The participant's behavior was analyzed (e.g., using professional eye-tracking tools) and their feedback collected.

The second initiative was to find a capable designer who could give BibSonomy a fresh, cool look and feel while making functional and intuitive navigational design a key priority. Finally, since changing established workflows and interfaces is usually a delicate matter, another priority was to keep a new design true to the current look and feel.
We are happy to announce that for that task we could win a young designer from Kassel: Daniil Tanygin.

Before we begin to realize a new design, we now want to ask you - our users - for your opinion. Therefore, here are two of the latest sketches Daniil has created for us that show one of the many post-listing sites (e.g., myBibSonomy or home) in BibSonomy:

Any feedback is welcome. We are especially looking forward to your thoughts on the new design ideas and to your own ideas on workflows that you think should be simplified, parts of the page that in your opinion should look different or functions that need to be made more intuitive.
Feel free to state any comment below this post, or send us your feedback via e-mail to webmaster bibsonomy org

Happy tagging
Stephan

[Feature of the Week] BibSonomy Forecast: Partly (tag)cloudy!

2011-11-30T15:16:00.008+01:00

Since its beginning, BibSonomy has undergone several changes - layouts were modified (who of you can still recall the early style from 2005?), new functions were added, internal modules were restructured to enhance performance, and many more. However, throughout these times, the very core of BibSonomy remained the same - namely to be a system to collaboratively annotate (bookmark and publication) resources using freely chosen tags. Despite the fact that the "Web 2.0 hype" is declining since quite some time, the usefulness of free social annotations is reflected e.g. in the usage of tags to organize questions at stackoverflow. So to use a pointed formulation, one could say that tags and their aggregation into tag clouds are a bit like the "heart" of BibSonomy as a social bookmarking platform.

Taking a look back in this way, we decided to polish up our tag clouds a bit. Since the last release, you will have noticed a slight but noticeable change: We've tried to make our tag clouds a bit "cloudier" and nicer. Mainly we've fixed the way how tag sizes are computed (as usually, larger and more visible fonts correspond to more frequently used tags; but we're scaling differently to convey a clearer picture), and changed the alignment. Here is how it looked before:

And here's the new look:

As you can see, it's no revolution, but just a bit nicer and cleaner. But because tags are to close to BibSonomy's (and of course our) heart, we're happy about this neat improvement. We've basically done this for all clouds - this means also for personal or group tag clouds. So we hope you like the new style as much as we do, and you can be even a bit happier when tagging :)

Best,

Dominik

New Release (2.0.20)

2011-11-24T11:01:00.004+01:00

Yesterday we deployed our monthly release of BibSonomy - we're at version 2.0.20 now. The new improvements and features of this release are mainly of internal nature; in addition, we fixed a lot of bugs in order to make your overall usage experience better. Specifically, this release contained the following improvements:

First embedding of schema.org metadata to facilitate a structured access by search engines
fixed Delicious importer
fixed sphere dialogues
fixed authorization issue via Typo3 plugin
fixed layout problems on BibSonomy's mobile view
many further small bug & layout fixes
added new scraper for Google Books
repaired scrapers (Amazon, PubMed, Cell, CiteseerX)
adapted database indexes for faster response times
added support for synchronization to REST-API

In December, we will take a break from our monthly release cycle, to be prepared to start the new year 2012 with the next release. Until there, stay tuned, and happy tagging!

Dominik

Short down time today

2011-11-16T17:20:00.003+01:00

A short explanation on why BibSonomy was down this morning: Actually, BibSonomy was running fine but one of the routers which connects our university building with the internet was down. Unfortunately, we have no influence on the infrastructure which usually works very good. It took two hours before the router was working properly again. Sorry for this and lets keep our fingers crossed that the router will not go down again.

Feature of the week: Add new publications by ISBN

2011-11-16T16:04:00.013+01:00

This week we present a small but - we think - nice feature and we hope it will save you a lot of time. While searching for interesting and new papers the boring part is often to collect all meta data for storing the new entry. We try to make this part as easy as possible and several earlier blog posts describe the bookmarklet or the underlying scraping service which extracts important information for you. If you do not have the necessary bookmarklet, you have to add it to your browser. The scraping service can also be utilized to add a publication identified just by its ISBN or DOI.

There are two ways to do this: The first way is directly via our web service. You start by clicking post publication in the menu and select the ISBN/DOI add dialog which looks like this:

Then you enter your ISBN or DOI and all the information is gathered for you and your are done by entering some keywords (tags) to describe the content. Try it e. g. with the following ISBN: 978-3898383325.

The other way is more common. Imagine, you were searching the web for something new and found a book you would like to remember. Unfortunately, the book you found was on one of the pages that we do not offer a scraper for. But on the page is an ISBN like on the publisher page of Robert's dissertation. Just highlight the ISBN and use your bookmarklet and all data will be collected. Before you press the button, your browser should look like this:

So, that's all for today and I hope this best practices helps you to save time and collect a lot of references for your work.

Happy tagging
Andreas

Feature of the Week: Discussion Statistics Box

2011-11-13T12:20:00.022+01:00

This week's post is about a small addition we have made to the sidebar of BibSonomy's discussed-post-pages: a collection of some basic statistics describing discussion and review habits.
As you probably know from your own experiences people tend to have very different approaches when it comes to rating something. Even if they agree by trend in liking or disliking a resource, they might have very different ideas of how to express such an opinion. This makes it particularly hard to objectively compare two ratings - a problem that is known as inter-rater reliability.
For illustration consider some fictional (extreme) examples of BibSonomy users, rating a publication with 4.5 out of 5 possible stars:

jock: Jock assigns top scores to everything he doesn't particularly dislike. His rating of a publication with only 4.5 out of 5 indicates that there must be something seriously wrong with it.
g.rumpy: For him "I like it" means 2 out of 5 stars. Full score is not even an option and a score of 4.5 probably means, that it's the best stuff ever written.
mr.normal: Well, Mr. Normal is very normal and so is his rating distribution.

It is quite clear, that for each of those three the value 4.5 out of 5 means something very different. The new statistics box provides some information that can be used to interpret a user's rating by summarizing his previous ratings. Here is, what the statistics box could look like for our three characters:

The statistics box can be found on the discussed-posts-page of any user, e. g. here for user sdo: http://www.bibsonomy.org/discussed/user/sdo.
Each box shows the rating distribution, the total number of ratings and the rating average by this user.

Another such box can be found on the general discussed posts page http://www.bibsonomy.org/discussed.
Here, the statistics cover all ratings to any of the discussed publications or bookmarks displayed by any user.

Enjoy the new possibility to learn what other users might think about resources of your interest.

Happy Tagging!
Stephan

Feature of the Week: Introducing BibSonomy Spheres

2011-10-28T22:56:00.030+02:00

What are BibSonomy Spheres?

As a social bookmark and publication sharing system, most of BibSonomy's content is user generated and as the number of users using the system is increasing, also the amount of information available increases. Consequently more and more topics of interest come into the system and accordingly the user has to somehow focus on relevant entries. One approach for focussing on relevant resources is to just look at entries of users which are relevant for you. But interests are diverse and accordingly the set of relevant users distributes over the set of interests.

BibSonomy now allows you to arbitrarily group other users according to your topics of interest. You could, e.g. build a group of your co-workers and one of users which you share some interests. Such a group is called "Sphere".

How can a build a sphere and assign users to it?

If you have identified a user as relevant to, e.g., your 'soccer' topic of interest, you can navigate to the users page in BibSonomy (e.g. http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/folke).
on the top of the sidebar (on the right) you see the 'friend' button.

Here you can add or remove the user from some of your spheres but you can also create a new sphere by entering the corresponding name into the input field and pressing 'add' (or the enter key). Note that you can directly navigate to each sphere by clicking on the sphere names.

Accessing your Spheres

You get a brief summary of your spheres if you navigate to http/www.bibsonomy.org/spheres (or by following the 'mySpheres' entry in your personal menu. On this summary page you essentially find each sphere's members as well as the corresponding tag clouds:

But also on the side bar on your profile page or the friends page you find a "sphere cloud" linking to your spheres:

As on any other resource list in BibSonomy, you can also follow a given sphere using a rss-feed (publrss/sphere/).

Following a Sphere in iGoogle

You can finally follow a sphere by adding our brand new iGoogle gadget to your iGoogle Dashboard. Just add our gadget either directly http://www.bibsonomy.org/resources/opensocial/gadgets/bibsonomySpheresGadget.xml or even simpler by following this link (please don't get irritated by the privacy dialog - we don't access any of your private data stored at google. We just store your query parameters).

Why should I use BibSonomy spheres?

Firstly, of course, because it is a cool feature ;-) But we will also to continue to build services upon BibSonomy's Spheres, such as personalized user and tag recommendations, improving search and many more. By using BibSonomy Spheres you also support this development by providing valuable data for training our models.

Finally

BibSonomy Spheres as well as the iGoogle Gadget are in an early development phase. Please excuse any bug you encounter and leave us a short message, so that we can fix it as soon as possible. We are also open to improvements. So, if you happen to have any comments, pleas don't hesitate to email us.

Best Wishes,

Folke Mitzlaff

Today's Release (2.0.19)

2011-10-26T14:17:00.001+02:00

Today we released BibSonomy 2.0.19, parts of the source code are again available in our Maven repository.

As always, this release contains numerous small bugfixes. Here we typically present only the coolest new features or important changes and fixes. Today I want to make an exception from this and give you the complete list of changes such that you can get an impression on what we've been working in the last month. Of course, there are more features in progress that will be released soon.

List of Changes for BibSonomy 2.0.19:

slightly new layout for start page
only posts from trusted users are now shown on start page
introduced spheres (hint: a highly interesting feature that will be presented by Folke in the next feature of the week)
added statistics for the /discussed page
removed deprecated Bibsonomy class from REST API - use RESTLogic instead
removed Delicious Yahoo! importer
better exception handling for Delicious import
migrated add/remove friend
filter param "myPDF" renamed to "JUST_PDF", "myDuplicates" to "DUPLICATES"
BibTeX key no longer marked as required and is now automatically generated, if not entered on /postPublication
tag field marked as required input
removed sidebar filter
optional fields (homepage, realname) now hidden during registration
"join group" links in new layout; only shown when not already member
fixed width of group real name for /group pages
JSON export now contains separated person names (first/last)
larger headings for tab layouts
fixes for PLOS and ScienceDirect scraper
fixed OpenID bug (whitespace around OpenID)
related users in sidebar now as cloud (not list)
added HTTP Basic Authentication (only available when SSL is used)
added SSL (only available when HTTP Basic Authentication is used)

As always, we'll go into detail in our "Feature of the Week" blog post series.

Happy tagging!

Feature of the Week: BibSonomy on Twitter

2011-10-22T00:13:00.001+02:00

From now on, you can follow news and developments of BibSonomy on Twitter. Under the alias BibSonomyCrew we’ll announce new features and new blog posts.
We’ll also let you know about new papers, workshops or presentations dealing with BibSonomy.

To read our tweets you can follow us here: http://twitter.com/#!/BibSonomyCrew. Or check out the silver-gray box to the right of this blog showing the latest tweets.

Two more things:

We are always curious to find out what others learn from BibSonomy’s data. Therefore, if one of your papers using a BibSonomy dataset has been accepted for publication, please let us know. We’ll be happy to announce your paper on Twitter to let others in the community know about your findings!

At the moment, we are planning to extend our twitter by e. g. posting popular posts or best rated resources. If you have anything particular in mind that you’d like to read on Twitter just tell us.

Happy Tagging!
Stephan

AutoCompletion for Post Publication Details

2011-10-18T08:38:00.000+02:00

This week we present a new feature that supports you in posting a publication.When posting a publication, up to now all fields (for example authors, BibTex key, year, booktitle, volume, ....)
have been autocompleted by the alphabetically first entry of all available entries BibSonomy knows. Now, when two or more options for a field are available this is indicated by a small triangle on the right edge of the specific field.

With a simple mouseclick on this triangle you can see and choose between all entries that have already been used. The number of times this entry has already been used appears in parentheses.

Feature of the week: person name normalization in "Last, First" form

2011-10-07T17:52:00.002+02:00

As announced earlier, we changed the format of person names for author and editor fields in publication posts from First Last to Last, First in the last release. Since this has quite some implications, I would like to discuss the changes a bit more in detail in this feature of the week.

Why "Last, First"?

The change from the First Last format (e.g., "D.E. Knuth") to Last, First ("Knuth, D.E.") was an overdue step that has been requested by many users of BibSonomy (see also the comments on our blog post).

The old format did not allow our users to correctly store user names that contain two last names. For example, in the name of our colleague Beate Navarro Bullock the first name was erroneously detected to be "Beate Navarro" but it really is only "Beate". When such data was exported from BibSonomy, other systems could not repair it. For instance, in a literature list this would have caused a wrong position of the reference (under "B" instead of "N" in our example). Furthermore, name based citations like [Navarro Bullock et al., 2009] would have used the wrong last name ("Bullock" instead of "Navarro Bullock").

With the new Last, First format (Navarro Bullock, Beate), the name is correctly stored and recognized by other applications and BibSonomy itself (e.g., for the author pages). BibSonomy does no longer "destroy" correctly entered names!

By the way, the new format also correctly handles the lineage (e.g., "Jr.") of persons. You can enter it in the form Last, Jr, First and you will get it back in the same format.

Interaction with BibSonomy

Naturally, this change is of big importance to all users and applications that import data into BibSonomy or export their data from BibSonomy. Since BibSonomy supports a wide variety of import and export formats, I will here briefly explain how each format is handled.

In general, each input format supports both First Last and Last, First. E.g., XML and JSON with BibSonomy's REST-API and the BibTeX and EndNote import in the web interface.
When editing a publication reference, you can basically use the format you like. However, after saving the post, the names will be normalized and when you edit it the next time, they will be in Last, First
order:
This has the advantage that you can see if both parts of the name were correctly identified.
Both the XML (format=xml) and the JSON (format=json) output of BibSonomy's REST-API use Last, First for the author and editor attributes of the bibtex element.
Nothing has changed in BibSonomy's "regular" JSON export. Person names are returned in "First Last" form:
```
"author": [ 
    "Douglas Crockford"
  ],
```
After the next release (scheduled for October 26th), the JSON output will additionally include the fields "authors" and "editors" (notice the "s" at the end) with separated "first" and "last" parts:
```
"authors": [ 
    {"first" : "Douglas", "last" : "Crockford"}
  ],
```
The BibTeX export now returns authors and editors in Last, First form. You can change this to First Last by adding the parameter firstLastNames=on to the URL. Alternatively, you can use our new export dialog that is triggered by moving the mouse over the BibTeX export link on each page:
The EndNote, RIS (EndNote), and RIS (ReferenceManager) export all use the Last, First format.
For all other export formats we did not change the person name format (to the best of my knowledge).

Please note that most applications (like BibTeX, JabRef, Citavi, or EndNote) support both types of formats anyway and thus Last, First should not bring you any problems but rather the possibility to correctly represent more types of person names than First Last.

What else did change?

During our intensive tests of the new format we realized that BibSonomy has quite a lot of data that is - to be hones - broken, dirty, inconsistent. E.g., author fields like "A. Einstein and" or "Knuth, D.E., Kleinberg, J.", etc. In short: strings where often there is no hope that we can automatically and correctly clean them.
What was more important, however, was the fact that due to the new normalization some hashes of posts, i.e., their unique identifiers changed. When we realized this we thought about the implications and finally looked at the numbers - of 2795609 posts only 20215 posts (less than one percent) changed. And as said - almost all of these posts had broken or "dirty" person names and clearly stemmed from broken batch imports.

Feature of the Week: Discussed Posts

2011-09-30T12:50:00.017+02:00

"My God, It's full of Stars!" is what you're supposed to say when entering a big black monolith and it's also what you'll probably think when checking out this week's new BibSonomy feature.
Before the summer break we introduced the new review and discussion feature. Now, we have added a page to BibSonomy that gives an overview over all those resources that have been reviewed or commented. You can reach it at www.bibsonomy.org/discussed or just by clicking the new "discussed posts" link in the menu.
The page lists all the recently discussed bookmarks and publications. To make the overview as concise and discussion-focused as possible, the posts are displayed in a reduced form including the title, the description and of cause the average star rating. The stars also function as link to the resource's discussion page, where you can add your own comments or review.
If you are looking for a contribution by someone in particular, there is a user specific version of the "discussed"-page. E. g. www.bibsonomy.org/discusse d/user/hotho has bookmarks and publications discussed by user hotho. Find a link to these pages in the sidebar of the regular user pages e. g. www.bibsonomy.org/user/hotho.

You'll reach your personal discussed page in the myBibSonomy menu under the item myDiscussedPosts.

We hope, the new feature will make it easier for you to engage in discussion of the current hot topics of science!
Let us know your opinion and make sure the discussed-page is always "full of stars"!

Stephan

Release 2.0.18

2011-09-22T15:36:00.007+02:00

The Summer break is officially over and thus we have just released BibSonomy 2.0.18.
At our Maven repository you'll find the publicly available libraries.
As announced earlier by Robert, the name handling has been changed to always storing names as "last name, first name".
Further, this release introduces:

an autocomplete for the inbox systemTag "send",
an autocomplete for the detailed information fields during publication posting,
an easy means to normalize your BibTeX keys,
another supported filetype for the document upload: .tex,
and scraping-support for publication posting from INSPIRE β and Taylor & Francis Online.

As always, we'll go into detail in our "Feature of the Week" blog post series.

Happy tagging!
Stephan

Feature of the week: access your posts in Emacs (with RefTeX)

2011-09-12T15:21:00.002+02:00

This week's feature of the week is something for our more experienced users but I guess that applies to many Emacs users anyway. ;-)

For all of you that write their LaTeX files using GNU Emacs I present a small script that simplifies its interaction with BibSonomy.
First, if you don't know and use RefTeX yet, I highly recommend that you give it a try, it's really awesome! I won't go into detail how to activate it, typically something like

; load reftex                                                                                                
(require 'reftex)
; turn reftex on                                                                                             
(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'turn-on-reftex)   ; with AUCTeX LaTeX mode

in your Emacs configuration file ~/.emacs should be sufficient.
Adding citations to your LaTeX file with RefTeX is as easy as typing C-c [. Then you can search for appropriate entries using a regular expression.

What I want to show you in this feature of the week is how you can add a script to RefTeX such that each time RefTeX is initialized your BibTeX references are downloaded from BibSonomy. For this to work you must follow the following steps:

Find out which posts you want to use from BibSonomy.
Add an appropriate \bibliography{} command to your LaTeX file.
Write a small shell script.
Tell RefTeX about the script.
Try it!

Find out which posts you want to use from BibSonomy

Let us assume that I am writing a paper about formal concept analysis (fca). So I want to reference publications from my list of fca-related publications that I can get at http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/jaeschke/fca. Since I want all publications in BibTeX format, the file I finally want to have is http://www.bibsonomy.org/bib/user/jaeschke/fca?items=1000. Notice the modifications in bold print.

Add an appropriate `\bibliography{}` command to your LaTeX file

Since the script presented later is rather simple, this is related to the posts I want to download, i.e., to the tag fca:

\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{fca}

That means the BibTeX file will be named after the tag(s) used to query BibSonomy.

Write a small shell script

Of course, we have done this for you. :-) Nevertheless, you should adopt it to your needs, in particular change the variable BASEURL (e.g., insert your BibSonomy username):

#!/bin/sh

FILE=$1
RESULTFILE=`pwd`/$FILE.bib
BASEURL=http://www.bibsonomy.org/bib/user/jaeschke
PARAMS="?items=1000"
QUERYURL=$BASEURL/$FILE$PARAMS

# the file is downloaded on each call of the script - 
# typically on the first call of reftex-citation
wget -q -O - $QUERYURL > $RESULTFILE

# the result for RefTeX: the path to the downloaded file
echo $RESULTFILE

The script gets as input from RefTeX the string from the \bibliography{} command (if you have several files specified, the script is called for each file). Then, it downloads your posts from BibSonomy using the input as tag of the user jaeschke. The downloaded file is put into the current directory (named after the tag(s)) and its name is returned to standard output (this is what RefTeX expects).

Place the script at some convenient location, let's say /usr/local/bin/find_file_from_bibsonomy.sh.

Of course, the script can and should be adopted to your needs. If you have suggestions for improvements, just let us know!

Tell RefTeX about the script

Add the following lines to your ~/.emacs file:

; connect RefTeX with BibSonomy                                                                        
(setq reftex-use-external-file-finders "yes")
           
(setq reftex-external-file-finders 
   (cons '("bib" . "/usr/local/bin/find_file_from_bibsonomy.sh %f") 
      reftex-external-file-finders)
   )

Try it!

Well, just open the LaTeX file and press C-c [ on your keyboard (for non-Emacs users: Pressing the Ctrl-Key together with "c" and then releasing both keys and pressing "["). Then search for some author name or keyword (e.g., "fca")

and be surprised about the results

You can choose any of the matching posts and the corresponding \cite{} command is automatically added to your document. And the best thing is: all the posts are coming from BibSonomy!

Improvements

The script above always tries to download the entries from BibSonomy - even if you already have one with that name. Here is an updated version that acts only if the requested file name starts with a configurable prefix, in this case bibsonomy_.

#!/bin/sh                                                                           

# All files with publications from BibSonomy should have
# this prefix - to not overwrite other files.
PREFIX="bibsonomy_"
# query                               
BASEURL="http://www.bibsonomy.org/bib/user/jaeschke"
PARAMS="?items=1000"

# the first parameter is the file name from the \bibliography{}
# command                                  
FILE=$1

# check for prefix
if [ $(echo $FILE | grep "^$PREFIX") ]; then
    # prefix found -> work on

    # remove prefix for tag query
    TAG=$(echo $FILE | sed "s/^$PREFIX//")
    # build path for result file and query URL
    RESULTFILE=`pwd`/$FILE.bib
    QUERYURL=$BASEURL/$TAG$PARAMS

    # the file is downloaded on each call of the script - typically on
    # the first call of reftex-citation
    wget -q -O - $QUERYURL > $RESULTFILE

    # the result for RefTeX: the path to the downloaded file
    echo $RESULTFILE

else
    # just return the file name in case the file is in the current
    # directory                                
    echo $FILE.bib
fi

That means that in the example above we must change in our LaTeX document \bibliography{fca} to \bibliography{bibsonomy_fca}. That's it!

Further improvements will be added to this section.

(Classic) Feature of the Week: Attaching documents to publication posts

2011-09-12T07:51:00.010+02:00

One of the most prominent advantages of BibSonomy is that it facilitates the collaborative management of metadata - e.g. author, year or title - of publication posts. While this is very useful within several phases of doing research or knowledge work, possessing the "data" which the metadata is about is crucial as well. In other words: Finding a highly interesting BibTeX entry is worth much more when one is able to locate the corresponding document (e.g. PDF) as well.

As some of you may already know, BibSonomy allows to attach documents to publication posts to keep all relevant information (i.e. metadata and data) in a single place. In order to upload a document to one of your posts within your collection, visit its details page - there you find an option to "Add further documents":

Once you click on "add", you can select a local file (with a suitable file extension) for upload:

When you're done, all existing private documents are displayed. Please note that you can upload further documents as well:

For an easy access to your documents, we display a tiny document symbol next to the publication title (see below); in addition, you can visit the "myDocuments" page, which lists only those publications from your collection which have a document attached:

Because copyright is of course an issue when talking about publication documents, all your documents are private, i.e. accessible only to yourself. An exception are groups: When the group administrator enables this feature, then all the other group members are able to see and download your documents as well.

In any case we hope that this feature makes your publication management life another bit easier and smoother - as usual, we are happy about any kind of feedback and suggestions!

Happy tagging, Dominik

(Classic) Feature of the week: Posting Publications as snippet

2011-09-01T14:00:00.019+02:00

Hello everyone,

this week we learn how to post a publication using a snippet. This is a very comfortable way to post a publication. Just click on post publication and choose the tab snippet.

We can paste one or multiple snippets into the BibTeX/EndNote snippet* box. The visibility of our post is controlled with the viewable for field.

Basically, that is all we have to do. But our snippet importer offers some additional goodies. We can choose to edit before import or to overwrite an existing one.

The best part is the tag capability of BibSonomy. Many snippets already have keyword or tag field as in the following example:

We can use these tags for our import. Since there is no standard for tags and their delimeters, we have to tell BibSonomy our format. Therefore, we have to select the type of tag delimiter from the corresponding drop down menu. We can choose between:

' ' (whitespace),
, (somma), and
; (semicolon).

We have to set a whitespace substitute sign if we do not use whitespaces as tag telimiter. A '_' is used otherwise. To specifiy our own one, just klick into the text field and remove the underscore and replace it with our own sign.

After we click on the post button appears the next dialog:

It is just a confirmation dialog to be sure that our tags get imported correctly. If everything is fine, we can click on the update button to finish the import.

That is it for this week. Stay tuned and happy tagging!

Jürgen

(Classic) Feature of the week: Posting Publications

2011-08-26T22:40:00.011+02:00

Hi everybody!

As we allow ourself a short rest from BibSonomy's strict monthly release cycle, the next few blog posts here will cover some of BibSonomy's basic features. We start this series of "classic" features with describing the process of entering publications into BibSonomy.

Most of BibSonomy's users are using the bookmarklet buttons which allow to automatically extract all necessary meta data from the browser's window. Nevertheless, BibSonomy offers several ways to enter relevant information for a given publication. Today I'll describe the most basic one - namely manual data entry of all required fields.
By navigating to "post publication" in BibSonomy's menu,the input form for entering publication meta information is shown:

We know that entering publication meta information is a tedious work and we try our best to reduce the required steps for successfully filling out all fields. During the manual data entry process, the most valuable support is given by a full-text-search based autocompletion. If you partially enter the title of a publication which is already known to BibSonomy, you can select the corresponding entry from a list of recommendations. All available form fields will be copied and it remains for you to provide the set of appropriate tags:

Stay tuned and happy tagging!

.folke

Feature of the Week: Updated mobile interface

2011-08-22T09:19:00.006+02:00

Since its first release in May the mobile version of BibSonomy has received some smaller updates. Here they are:

Especially on mobile devices typing and retyping user names and passwords can be tedious. Therefore , the login screen now offers a checkbox to choose staying logged in after the session.
If you'd like to see the original BibSonomy page on your mobile screen you may use the "Switch to normal view" link in the footer of the mobile layout. Similarly, you can switch back using the "Switch to mobile view" link in the footer of the normal view.
Your choice of view is now stored. Thus, once you decide to use the normal view, you'll see that view until you decide otherwise. You won't have to switch to your preferred view each time you visit BibSonomy.

Happy Tagging!
Stephan

Feature of the week: Supported Filetypes

2011-08-12T22:46:00.007+02:00

Some months ago, Stephan presented BibSonomy's enhanced file upload feature which allows you to attach documents to your publication meta data - such as, e.g., a private copy of the paper or your own personal notes. In response to your feedback, we extended the list of supported file types which now encompasses the following file types:

pdf for the Portable Document Format
ps for PostScript files
djv, djvu for scanned documents in the DjVu file format
txt for plain text files
doc, docx for Microsoft Word documents
ppt, pptx for PowerPoint presentations
xls, xlsx for Excel spreadsheets
ods, odt, odp for documents, spreadsheets and presentations in the OpenDocument format

Please let us know, if your favourite file format is not supported.
Once again: Happy Tagging!
.folke

Feature of the Week: The Hidden Tag

2011-08-05T17:50:00.008+02:00

Not so long ago we introduced Hidden SystemTags. SystemTags are tags, that usually come with a special ability, such as markup (e.g. myown lets one of your posts appear on your cv page) or certain functionality (e.g. send forwards posts to another user's inbox).
Hidden SystemTags are those among them, that are visible only to you who used it, but not to anyone else who might take a look at your posts or tags.

With the last release, we introduced a new such SystemTag that does nothing:

sys:hidden:<somethingVerySecret>.

It does nothing? Why use it then? - Well, the feature simply allows you to use private tags. You may use any tag you like with the prefixes sys:hidden: or system:hidden: and no one else will see them.
The sys:hidden-Tag (as any hidden systemTag) is visible to you once you hover with your mouse over the little cog wheel in a post's tag list.

Note, that the hidden tag is not meant to be a privacy feature. Rather, the feature allows to hide tags e.g. organizational-note-tags from publication lists for beautification.
The hidden tags are not visible on tag clouds and post lists, but, you can e. g. query for a certain sys:hidden tag and still find all posts tagged with it. For really private information the private note feature of publications will be the appropirate choice.

Happy Tagging!
Stephan

Release 2.0.17

2011-07-27T17:14:00.004+02:00

Today we updated BibSonomy to 2.0.17. The publicly available libraries are available at our Maven repository.
As always the release included some internal restructuring and clean-up. We also included two new features:

The Hidden SystemTag: A tag that is visible only to you: sys:hidden:<mySecretTag>
OpenID Quicklinks: We added the three most frequently used OpenID providers as links to our sign-in page.

In August we'll take a (summer-) break from releasing. However, we are already busy developing new features including the restructuring of author and editor names.
We'll also continue to blog about BibSonomy features in our feature-of-the-week series during that time.

The next release is scheduled for September 2011.

Happy tagging!
Stephan

Sort your Bookmark Lists

2011-07-23T17:02:00.012+02:00

In June 2011 we presented to you the functionality of arranging your publications by
year, month, day, author, editor, entrytype, title, booktitle, journal, school in ascending or descending order (see blog entry). Now it is also possible to sort bookmarks by date and title. For example if you want to sort all your own bookmarks with the tag localization by title in ascending order, you just need to use the URL parameters sortPage and sortPageOrder.

With sortPage you can control whether you want to sort by title (sortPage=title) or date (sortPage=date). With sortPageOrder you can control whether you want to sort in ascending (sortPageOrder=asc) or in descending (sortPageOrder=desc) order.

A note on problems with Google-based OpenID logins

2011-07-15T15:32:00.003+02:00

Recently we got mails from users that can not login to BibSonomy using their Google OpenID. Today we traced at least one of the cases down to a problem with Google's OpenID service.

There are two types of OpenID's Google supports:

The "one for everybody" OpenID https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id.
Your personal Google Profile page, e.g. https://profiles.google.com/114248476628351395042.

There are quite some web pages that discuss the different types (e.g., this discussion, this explanation, or this article) and even more forum posts that describe problems (e.g. this one).

The thing is, that recently the profile page OpenID's cause problems. We were not able to login or register using these at BibSonomy. After trying to find out why this does not work, we found out that the problem is Google itself. Google's profile web pages do not contain a resource descriptor that OpenID4Java can discover. We could not even find one manually. This basically means, that the https://profiles.google.com/ type of OpenID is broken.

By the way: not only BibSonomy has problems with Google's profiles OpenIDs, other web pages have them, too. We tried to register at Stack Overflow using https://profiles.google.com/114248476628351395042 and got the error "Unable to log in with your OpenID provider: No OpenID endpoint found."

Until Google fixes this issue, we can only suggest to use the other type of OpenID, i.e., https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id to sign in to BibSonomy.

To make this easier, we enhanced the OpenID login page to include quick-links for three major OpenID providers: Google, Yahoo!, and myOpenID.net:

We will stay tuned with this problem and see, if Google will fix it!

Have a nice weekend and enjoy tagging ...

Update (2011-08-02):

Since last Friday (2011-07-29), we had problems with OpenID login caused by an incorrectly installed SSL certificate. This was fixed today. Thus, OpenID login with providers such as Google, Yahoo! or Xlogon.net works, again.

With MyOpenID.com, however, we still face problems. The reason seems to be that the root certificates for the certification authority MyOpenID.com uses (StartCom) are not contained in the JVMs truststore (bug entry on openid4java). We imported them manually but this did not solve the problem. We will try to find out what's going wrong.
<update> OpenID with MyOpenID.com works now. Importing certificates with Java's keytool command is quite cumbersome. It ask's for a password but does not complain that no keystore was specified. :-(</update>

Feature of the Week: Reviews and Discussion

2011-07-12T14:58:00.025+02:00

Two important aspects of working with literature are the process of sharing it among your colleagues and the exchange of ideas and thoughts about it. Facilitating the first aspect - sharing - has always been a core feature of BibSonomy. However, this weeks blog post is all about the second aspect: Discussion!

BibSonomy's new and easy to use discussion feature is your forum to communicate your thoughts about publications and websites quickly to your friends and colleagues. Using the typical thread structure of forums users can add reviews or comments to publication and bookmark posts or reply to previous statements by other users.

Where can I discuss?

If you take a look at any page in BibSonomy with a post list (e.g. home), you'll find a link reading "discussion" right next to each post's copy link and a five star rating below each post. Clicking on either takes you to the discussion page of that web page or publication, that the post is about.
You may discuss about any posted resource (web page or publication) even if you did not post it yourself! Keep in mind, that several posts (e.g. from different users) can be about the same resource. Since the discussions are always about the resources (never about specific posts) the discussion links of such posts all lead to the same discussion.
As an example, take a look at a short discussion about an html5 web page.

How can I discuss?

There are two ways to start a discussion or to add to one. For both of them you will have to be logged in.

Reviews: Reviews are designed to let you state your opinion. Each review contains a rating of up to five stars. (Yes, we allow the assignment of half stars and even of zero stars for the worst case!)
Additionally you can enter some text to explain your rating. You can add at most one review to a discussion. However, you can always edit or even delete your review.
Comments: Use comments to enter some text without assigning a rating. Choose to comment on a posted resource directly or reply to previous reviews or comments. Basically, you can comment as often as you like and edit or delete your comments at any time. To create a comment just click the blue create comment button. To comment in reply to another user's statement use the reply link below that statement.

Who can read it?

Both, comments and reviews come with two visibility settings.

The first controls the visibility of your user name. If you check anonymous, nobody (except you) will see who made the statement.
The second option is similar to the viewable-for option during the regular posting and controls the visibility of the complete review or comment. You can set your statement viewable for anyone (public), for a group or for your friends (other) or only for yourself (private).

Everyone can discuss everyone's posted resources. Thus, the fact that you might own a post which has a rating, does not imply that you where the one rating it.

What do the stars represent?

When writing a review, the stars you assign represent your personal opinion about the publication or web page that is discussed.
The stars displayed next to each post represent the average rating over all reviews. The discussion page also shows a distribution of all ratings. The average also includes the ratings of reviews that have a limited visibility (and thus might be invisible to you).

What should I write?

The discussion feature is intended enable a lively online discussion about published literature and web pages. From a simple one-liner to your full-blown and detailed scientific review everything is welcome.
We hope, that the new feature will facilitate communication and improve the exchange of thoughts and ideas about news, trends and the state of the art in science.

Happy reviewing, rating, commenting, discussing and (as always) tagging!
Stephan

Release 2.0.16

2011-07-12T13:33:00.004+02:00

With some delay, today we upgraded BibSonomy to 2.0.16. We also updated our publicly available libraries at our Maven repository.
We are happy to announce, that this release includes the first version of a new major feature: Discussions and Reviews. We'll go into detail about that in our next blog post. But take a look at the stars you'll now find at the bottom right of every post and the new discussion link under each post.
Furthermore, new are:

two new hidden system-tags: sys:unfiled and sys:jabRef:<someArgument>
the extended functionality of the URL-parameter sortPage (sorting bookmarks is now possible)
more allowed file types for your private document upload.

The next release is scheduled for July 27th.

Happy tagging!
Stephan

The structure of author/editor names in publications

2011-07-05T15:38:00.000+02:00

As many of you have noticed, BibSonomy stores author (and editor) names in the order "First Last", e.g., "Donald E. Knuth".
For most names that is no problem, but there are also names that get broken by this "feature". For example, for the name of our colleague Beate Navarro Bullock the first name is erronously detected to be "Beate Navarro" but it really is only "Beate".

Such names can be handled correctly by storing them in the "Last, First" order, e.g., "Navarro Bullock, Beate" as it is understood by BibTeX and many other publication management systems.

Therefore, we plan to change BibSonomy's person name handling to always store author and editor names in the "Last, First" format.

For you as our users this has the following consequences:

Regardless of whether you enter your names in the "First Last" or "Last, First" format, they are always stored as "Last, First".
The post publication form and the BibTeX import will support both "First, Last" and "Last, First".
BibSonomy's BibTeX export will contain names in "Last, First" form.
All input and output of the "REST-API" will be in "Last, First" form.

There are certainly other things that might change and problems that we might find - we will post them in this blog.

We plan to introduce this change in our after-summer relase in September. We would be very glad to hear your comments or problems you expect.

What happened to some posts in our blog?

2011-07-05T15:15:00.000+02:00

As you might have noticed, some recent posts (namely, from yesterday, 4th of July) seem to be older. That is true! Yesterday, we cleaned up the tags of our earlier blog posts and thereby also fixed some headlines. Unfortunately, that caused the posts to appear under yesterday's date. So just ignore them or read them again, if you like. :-)

Our next release is scheduled for this week and will include something very new many of you have been waiting for!

Feature of the week: a quick look into 2010

2011-07-04T16:11:00.000+02:00

Complementing last week's review of 2009, we briefly look at our roadmap for 2010.

Posting Publications

An all-new redesign of the layout for and the process of posting publication references will be released in the beginning of 2010. We are currently testing the new implementation with a special emphasis on improved usability. With the help of two screenshots we want to give you some insights into the new posting dialogues.

The new entry page for posting without using the bookmarklet consists of four tabs which separate the four different ways of posting references to BibSonomy:

manually entering the details for one publication reference,
uploading a text snippet which contains references in EndNote or BibTeX format,
upload a file with references in EndNote/BibTeX format, or
entering a ISBN or DOI and let BibSonomy gather the publication metadata.

In particular the process of posting several publications at once will be improved. For example, you will be able to select which posts should be stored and correct errors. The dialog for posting one reference will be similar to the bookmark posting dialog with the important BibTeX fields title, author, year, etc. on top and the additional fields below the tag and group selection:

Full Text Search

We will migrate our full text search from MySQL to Lucene. This will improve the response time, add boolean search options, and allow you to search for words with less than four characters.

Curriculum Vitae (CV)

As part of our efforts in the PUMA project, we are currently implementing a curriculum vitae page which allows you to show your profile information together with your latest publications on one page. That page can act as an entry page to your scientific work and possibly augment your homepage.

Major Release with improved performance and new features

2011-07-04T16:10:00.000+02:00

Good news everyone - since this morning, we have successfully deployed a major new BibSonomy release! Usually, we try keep the release cycles small and release each feature separately; but as we optimized a lot of internal code in the last weeks and months, we built the new features on top of the updated infrastructure and released all of them right now.

All optimizations and new features were powered by PUMA, a German DFG-funded project. The internal migrations onto a more stable and cleaner framework should be transparent for you as our users - the only thing which you (hopefully) might experience is that everything runs faster and smoother. Apart from that, we added or updated the following functionalities (we just briefly describe them for now, and will present more details in followup posts in this blog during the next weeks):

Inbox:: Surely you've experienced the same problem as we did - sometimes you find a bookmark or a publication which is interesting for one of your friends. From now on, you can directly "send" these posts to other BibSonomy users - just add the tag 'send:FRIENDNAME' to the post, and it will appear in your friend's inbox!
CV page:: Another common requirement is that you want to have an easy-to-maintain CV page, featuring your personal details and publications. Have a look at my CV - BibSonomy supports you from now on in this task!
Enhanced filtering methods:: When retrieving posts, you can now add the tag 'sys:entrytype:ENTRYTYPE to filter the publications by their BibTeX entrytype. As an example, the following page shows you all publications of the user 'dbenz' which have the entrytype 'inproceedings': http://www.bibsonomy.org/bib/user/dbenz/sys:entrytype:inproceedings
Automatic DOI-Linking:: If a publication reference contains a DOI, a "DOI" link is now shown in publication lists.
New tag cloud controls:: Now you can limit the number of tags shown in tag clouds to the top x tags only! This feature is activated for all users to the top 50 tags and can be set back to the old behaviour (showing only tags that have a certain minimal frequency) on the settings page.
Improved user interfaces / dialogues:: We migrated several input dialogues onto a new internal framework, which results in an improved usability. Among them are the settings page, the post and edit publicaton page and the batch-editing of tags.

We performed intensive testing of all released features - if you should still encounter some anomalies, we would be highly grateful for any feedback or bug reports - just send us an email to webmaster@bibsonomy.org. In any case, we hope you enjoy the new features as much as we do!

Feature of the week: TagCloud

2011-07-04T16:09:00.000+02:00

Today we are going to present you the brand new TagCloud, implemented in the newest BibSonomy release.
While using BibSonomy your TagCloud grows bigger and bigger and easily becomes unattractive.
To avoid this fact and additionally give you a better view about your most used tags, the new TagCloud will now be able to show only the top X tags of you.
Where X can be set in your settings page and has an default value of 50 (Pic. 1).

Pic. 1: Your new TagCloud settings.

So this means instead of a 2-page long TagCloud, you will have a small and clear TagCloud containing your top tags (Pic. 2 & 3).

Of course you can still use the old TagCloud, if you feel fine with your current TagCloud behaviour and dont want to change it. The TagCloud can be set back to the old behaviour in your settings page by setting choice of tags to min Frequency.

Let's see it in action:

Feature of the Week: Next steps in BibSonomy

2011-07-04T15:58:00.001+02:00

As all of you have probably noticed we are actively working on BibSonomy, releasing constantly new features and improvements. We are not only in the process of developing and implementing new features but we are also discussing the goals and features which we would like to achieve in the next one or two years, triggered by the current projects "PUMA - Academic Publication Management" and "Informationelle Selbstbestimmung im Web 2.0 - Info 2.0" both funded by the German research foundation DFG. With this post we would like to share our ideas with you and we hope for feedback from you. Some of these ideas are more concrete others are relatively vague. So, feel free to comment on all of them.

One of the next features which will be released soon will allow our users to rate bookmarks and publications within the system. We will make this rating information available for external systems like search engines. Thus such information is available to everyone as early as possible – similar to ratings e.g. in results of an online search for hotels. Following this line we plan to add a discussion functionality in form of tweets or comments in the usual way. It is also planed to extend BibSonomy to a full open reviewing system. The idea is to allow everyone to do all kinds of reviews – ranging from a simple comment for a web site to a full blown scientific review for publications.

Another potential direction we are thinking of is the better integration with eLearning systems. We will start with export functions but the plan is to find some way to allow for users of an eLearning system to add new posts to BibSonomy from within their eLearning platform.

With PUMA we started a first clone of BibSonomy together with our university library. It has a slightly different functionality but the core is the same. To be more flexible we will add open social features which will not only allow for a better integration of BibSonomy data into other systems (such as iGoogle, or many of your social networks) but also for a more flexible adaptation of our system's design. Another major feature will be the availability of synchronization options among systems to allow easy accessibility of your and everyones posts from any system (BibSonomy or one of the PUMA instances). We are working an a lightweight version within PUMA but the big solution is the goal we would like to reach in the future.

One current hype comes from the massive use of smartphones. We are thinking of developing apps for the most popular smartphone systems: Android and iPhone. One of the core challenges is the adaptation of the BibSonomy design for the small devices. However, we would not only work on improvements for small screens but also on the design for our regular web site. We are thinking about the improvement of the design and usability of the system in cooperation with professional design and usability experts.

Besides all these new features we will of course constantly work on the improvement of the system's speed, on the improvement of its current functionality and on fixing bugs.

We hope you will like the new features and we are looking forward to your feedback. Please let us know your wishes and we will try to find a way to incorporate them into the system.

Happy Tagging
Andreas

Feature of the week: Localized Date Information

2011-06-24T16:33:00.003+02:00

This week I'll describe a rather small, but nevertheless important new feature. Some of you might never have noticed that the date of publications was rendered in many different ways - namely as it was given by the corresponding user who entered the publication meta information into BibSonomy.

With BibSonomy's last release we made some efforts to consolidate the representation of dates in publications. Some heuristics are applied for parsing as many different given date formats as possible. This allows us to render the corresponding date strings according to a consistent date format - especially depending on the logged in user's language settings.

Happy Tagging -- and stay tuned for the upcoming new release 2.0.16!

.folke

Feature of the Week: Posting to BibSonomy by Gesture with Android & Dolphin Browser

2011-06-17T15:18:00.010+02:00

Because we're still so proud of our mobile version of BibSonomy, this week's feature of the week is about how to ease the process of creating a bookmark or publication post via your Android mobile device.

Because typing lengthy texts and especially URLs is always a bit tedious on small screens and keyboards, the popular browser Dolphin HD offers the possibility of navigation by gestures. These gestures are simple figures drawn directly on the screen, which can be associated with a variety of actions. And here's a step-by-step manual how this mechanism can be used for creating new boomark of publication posts:

After opening the Dolphin Browser, tip on the gesture icon in the lower left corner, and then on the little cogwheel in the lower right corner to create a new gesture:

Choose "New Gesture" and select as action "Load URL" (first row) and paste the postBookmark- or postPublication-URL (see below) into the input field.
Choose a simple and memorable gesture (I chose e.g. a "B-like" gesture to post bookmarks, and a "P-like" one to post publications).
When you're navigating on an interesting page, just tip the gesture button in the lower right, do the corresponding gesture and you'll end up directly in the correct dialogue of BibSonomy (after logging in, of course):

Of course this is just one possibility to achieve this goal - if you have further best practices, we'd be happy to share them with you. In any case happy gesturing and tagging,

Dominik

postBookmark URL:

postPublication URL:

BibSonomy's Downtime, Finally!

2011-06-16T16:41:00.002+02:00

Since this day's noon BibSonomy is running in normal operation again. As we already said, the downtime was caused by a power outage in our neighborhood.

We try our very best to ensure 24/7 operation and we truly are aware of our responsibility. For handling power outages, we already distributed our server load over two independent UPSs (uninterrupted power supplies). A separately installed process monitors all our vital services and sends out pager messages to all responsible BibSonomy team members. The same was true last night - and accordingly our system administrator was on-site short after the power outage occurred. But their was nothing he could do, as the power outage lasted two long for our university's Internet main routers.

Until noon there were still issues connected with wrongly configured routers due to the blackout. But during the last few hours we monitored our systems and are now sure that everything is back to normal. For managing longer power outages in future we installed another UPS. Some permanently installed switches remain to be connected to the new UPS by a technician who already is scheduled.

As a consequence of this downtime which lasted way too long we enforce our activities in distributing BibSonomy's installation across two geographically independent locations. We hope that we didn't cause too many problems and we are really sorry for all inconveniences!

Keep on tagging!

.folke

BibSonomy's Downtime - Update

2011-06-16T08:27:00.003+02:00

Hi everybody,

we are still working to get BibSonomy up and running again.
We have experienced a long power blackout in the neighborhood yesterday and systems are only slowly coming back on - we're heavily working on that.
More updates as soon as the situation is resolved.

We'll be back!
Stephan

BibSonomy's Downtime, 15.6.2011

2011-06-15T23:22:00.002+02:00

Dear Tagging-Friends,

despite our efforts to ensure BibSonomy's reliable 24h service quality we are faced with an unscheduled downtime of our university's internet uplink. We hope that our technicians will fix the problem within the next hours.

We will write more on this issue tomorrow...

Stay tuned!

.folke

Feature of the Week: Sort your Post Lists

2011-06-10T11:25:00.010+02:00

The creation and export of publication lists has always been a core feature of BibSonomy. Using tags is an easy means to select publications for a list. Yet depending on the application, not only the selection of publications but also their order might be of importance. The latter can be controlled using the two URL parameters sortPage and sortPageOrder.
Here is an example: The URL
http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/sdo/social
returns a list of all posts of the user sdo with the tag social. Using the additional parameters sortPage=author and sortPageOrder=asc in the URL
http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/sdo/social?sortPage=author&sortPageOrder=asc
will yield that same list, ordered by the family names of the first authors in ascending order.

The parameter sortPageOrder has exactly two options: asc for ascending order and desc for the converse.
With the last release we added new options to the parameter sortPage. Thus one can now choose from: year, month, day, author, editor, entrytype, title, booktitle, journal, school and date.
All but the last one refer to fields of the according BibTeX entries of the posts. The option date however yields a list ordered by posting date -- the date of the post's (not the publication's) creation. The date option is the only one, that also concerns bookmark posts.

It is easily possible to combine different options using "|". For example will
http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/sdo/social?sortPage=year|month|day&sortPageOrder=desc
return a list where publication posts are ordered by their publication date (given in the BibTeX fields year, month and day).

Happy tagging!
Stephan

Release 2.0.15

2011-05-25T17:24:00.007+02:00

Today we updated the running version of BibSonomy to 2.0.15. We also updated our publicly available libraries at our Maven repository. The new release mainly contains various small bug fixes and a great deal of internal clean-up. As we are continuing our efforts to increase speed we restructured and compressed all JavaScript content of the website.
The main visible improvements are:

An overhaul of the handling and display of dates, for example the way a publications date is displayed in post lists.
New options for the URL-paramter sortPage. By adding "?sortPage=note" to a BibSonomy URL you can order the displayed posts by their note. Other new options for sortPage are "day" and "month".

In this release we also included a lot of preparations for new features that are currently being developed and will be included in one of the next releases. Stay tuned!
The next release (2.0.16) is scheduled for June 29th. If you have any feedback or comments regarding our new release, we'd be happy to hear from you!

Happy tagging!
Stephan

Feature of the Week: Improved Content-Negotiation Capabilities

2011-05-20T15:15:00.001+02:00

Today I describe a rather technical feature of BibSonomy that is important for programmers and in particular for Semantic Web enthusiasts.
As I already mentioned in my post from EKAW 2010, we are constantly trying to improve BibSonomy's integration into the Linked Data Cloud. In the 2.0.14 release of BibSonomy a new content negotiation mechanism was implemented that augments our first implementation from 2007.

Instead of using the special /uri/ prefix, we now perform content negotiation on all URLs BibSonomy serves. Depending on the HTTP Accept header of your client, you are redirected (with the HTTP status code 303 See Other) to a view representing the requested resource(s) in a corresponding format. The following media types are currently supported:

application/rdf+xml: RDF output according to the BuRST specification. This is basically a combination of the RSS and SWRC schema to describe publication references. Hence, currently only the publication posts are returned.
application/json: All posts (bookmarks and publications) in JSON format. This is a lightweight JavaScript data structure.
text/csv: All posts (bookmarks and publications) as comma separated values (CSV).
text/x-bibtex: Publications in BibTeX format.

In particular the application/rdf+xml media type is important for BibSonomy's integration in the Linked Data Cloud. There are still some issues we have to fix, e.g., proper representation of author order or the vocabulary to represent tagging information (e.g., using commontag.org in favour of/addition to the RSS taxonomy module). Therefore, many thanks to Sebastian Tramp and Pascal Hitzler for there helpful comments.

Finally: Please note that content negotiation works for all URLs, even when it currently does not really make sense. E.g., when you request the /login page in application/rdf+xml, you get a redirect to /burst/login. Since this page does not exist, you get a 404 Not Found error.

Feature of the Week: Delicious Importer

2011-05-18T10:59:00.018+02:00

BibSonomy supports its users in their scientific work by providing easy means to manage publication references and bookmarks. Since one of the most essential parts of work is the exchange with other folks, BibSonomy offers both export and import facilities to allow an easy and quick exchange of content with other people or even other systems.
A very popular bookmarking web service is Delicious. For quite a while now, BibSonomy contains an importer that can fetch your Delicious content and store it within your BibSonomy collection.

Since 2005, Delicious is run by Yahoo (only recently it was sold to Avos Systems), who enabled a new registration method: As an alternative to the creation of an extra Delicious account, users can use their Yahoo account to log on to Delicious.
However, with the new accounts also the interface to fetch posts changed, including the authentication protocol (to OAuth).

BibSonomy now provides two Delicious importers, one for the original and one for the Yahoo accounts. Both are found in your BibSonomy settings under imports below the Firefox importer. Both importers have two options:

What to import? Delicious bookmarks will be stored as BibSonomy bookmarks. Delicious tag bundles will be stored as relations (concepts) in BibSonomy. The bundle name will become the supertag and all the bundle tags will become its subtags.
Overwrite? In case you have bookmarked the same URL in BibSonomy and in Delicious you can decide whether the Delicious posts should replace those in BibSonomy.

To import from an old account (left) enter your Delicious user name and password and click import.
To import from a Yahoo account (right) just click import to be directed to Yahoo, where you will be asked to log in and then to agree to allow sharing of Yahoo info with BibSonomy.

In both cases, your posts or relations will be stored in your BibSonomy collection.

Happy tagging!
Stephan

Feature of the week: BibSonomy mobile

2011-05-06T09:47:00.011+02:00

If the BibSonomy development team can be seen as a reasonably representative sample of the technologically interested population, then smartphones are truly finding more and more their way into nowaday's everyday life (despite we still do have some "I-need-my-phone-only-to-make-phonecalls" bastions, but we're working on it :) ). If you share our enthusiasm about the possibilities offered by e.g. the iPhone or Android-powered devices, then we've got something for you: Since our last release, we're featuring a mobile-optimized version of BibSonomy. Check it out:

You don't need any special app - just point the browser of your mobile phone to the "usual" BibSonomy URLs (e.g. http://www.bibsonomy.org), and we'll detect automatically where you're coming from (technical sidenote: we use WURFL for that) and provide you with a BibSonomy website optimized for smartphones. It was built focussed on the following design principles:

Minimal amount of data transfer in order to speed up loading times and save bandwidth
Reduction of interface elements to ensure usability on small (touch-)screens
Similar navigation paradigm to mobile versions of other major websites
Restriction to required information when posting new entries (e.g. via ISBN) - completion of the entries then be done e.g. later on a desktop machine

Here's an explanation of the basic interface elements:

When navigating through these pages, it may happen from time to time that you end up seing a "normal" page - this can happen because so far, we've only migrated our most popular pages to the mobile version. We're still working on that, and are happy to receive feedback and suggestions which pages should be available next!

In any case enjoy BibSonomy from anywhere using our new mobile pages!

Dominik

PS: Thanks Folke for a great fotoshooting session ;-)

Bugfix version of BibSonomy JabRef Plugin (2.5.2) available

2011-05-04T10:30:00.005+02:00

As we've mentioned from time to time within our blog, we are maintaining a BibSonomy plugin for JabRef which basically makes it easy to keep your local .bib file (managed by JabRef) in sync with your online BibSonomy collection. We've just released a bugfix version of it - you can find it for download here:

http://www.bibsonomy.org/help/doc/jabref-plugin/download.html

And here you can find more detailed information about the plugin:

Installation instructions: http://www.bibsonomy.org/help/doc/jabref-plugin/installation.html
Version history: http://www.bibsonomy.org/help/doc/jabref-plugin/changes-report.html
General plugin help pages: http://www.bibsonomy.org/help/doc/jabref-plugin/index.html

If you have any feedback, we'd be happy to hear from you!

Best regards & happy BibTeXing,

Dominik

Release 2.0.14

2011-04-28T15:47:00.004+02:00

Today was the monthly release of BibSonomy. Next to small fixes, this release includes several efficiency improvements e.g.,

an overhaul of several pages reducing the amount of data and
a compression (gzip) of all content BibSonomy sends to your browser.

With the new release we also introduce two new features that we will discuss in greater detail in the upcoming "Feature of the week" posts.

BibSonomy goes mobile: We added a new design specifically for browsers on mobile devices (like smart phones or tablets). The new scheme reduces the amount of information on a page, emphasising the core informations of each page and making BibSonomy fun to use even on small displays.
BibSonomy now has experimental support for content negotiation using the HTTP "Accept" header. Depending on the value of the header, the client is redirected to a view with the specific content-type. Supported formats are "application/rdf+xml", "text/csv", "application/json", and "text/x-bibtex".

As always, get back to us with any kind of feedback and enjoy the new features.
Happy tagging!
Stephan

Feature of the Week: Use the RSS/Copy Link

2011-04-21T22:37:00.011+02:00

As you might already know, BibSonomy features a nice RSS feed for posts, i.e., bookmarks and publications.

An exemplary snapshot of the bookmarks looks like this:

Now, using the copy link you can directly copy entries to your personal posts.

The post can then be edited as usual:

Happy copying (and tagging)!
Martin

Feature of the Week: Optimize your Firefox Browser for BibSonomy

2011-04-12T23:21:00.001+02:00

How often do you use the search box of BibSonomy?

You can speed up searching in BibSonomy considerably by creating some
smart keywords in your Firefox webbrowser.
Afterwards, you can access all your posts with a certain tag with just some keystrokes. This blog post explains how to do this.

First try: Speed up fulltext search

Navigate to www.bibsonomy.org.
Right-click on the BibSonomy search box that says fulltext search here. Select Add a Keyword for this Search...
In the dialog that appears, enter a short keyword, e.g., bs (like BibSonomy search).
Fill the remaining fields and click Save.

Now you can search in BibSonomy by entering into your browser's location bar (reach it quickly with CTRL + L) the string bs SEARCHTERM, e.g., bs firefox and pressing ENTER. Firefox will then search for the term SEARCHTERM in BibSonomy, e.g., bs firefox opens www.bibsonomy.org/search/firefox.

Next steps: Add more keywords

Adding smart keywords for other search options in BibSonomy is now easy: just select the corresponding option in the dropdown box

and repeat the steps above with a new keyword. Here are some suggestions:

bt: search for a tag (e.g., /tag/firefox)
ba: search for an author (e.g., /author/Stumme)
bm: search for one of your tags (e.g. /user/jaeschke/myown). This is explained in the next step.

Finally: Quickly access your own posts

Adding a smart keyword to access your posts having a certain tag is now straightforward: go to your BibSonomy page and right-click into the enter tag(s) here field at the top. Again, select Add a Keyword for this Search...

and enter an appropriate keyword (e.g., bm for my tags).

Here I describe a more advanced method that searches for concepts instead of tags. Note that this works even if you don't have relations defined, yet!

Go to www.bibsonomy.org/concept/user/jaeschke/arbitrary_tag and exchange the user name in the URL by your user name, e.g., replace "jaeschke" by your user name. Press ENTER.
Right-Click in the input box containing the string arbitrary_tag and select Add a Keyword for this Search...:
Again, enter a smart keyword (I would suggest to use bm as described above.).
Search for your posts by entering bm TAGNAME into the location bar of your browser (remember CTRL-C).

Nothing new so far, except for the somehow difficult to access concept search field. But what are the benefits of /concept/user/jaeschke/programming compared to /user/jaeschke/programming? Well, I have created some relations using the tag editor of BibSonomy. One of them says that the tags ada, c, fortran, java, lisp, perl, python, and ruby are sub-tags of the tag (or better concept) programming:

Now, whenever I search for /concept/user/jaeschke/programming, I get all posts having the tag programming or one of its sub-tags, i.e., ada, c, fortran, java, lisp, perl, python, or ruby.

This way I can structure my tag space - and more important - use a logical OR in my queries.

More information about concepts and relations can be found here:

Feature of the Week: Hidden System Tags

2011-04-08T10:13:00.011+02:00

System tags are an easy means to facilitate your work with BibSonomy. Simply tagging a post with such a tag allows for example to forward that post to friends (send:xyz) or to a group (for:xyz), to mark the post as authored by yourself (myown) or to mark it relevant for a group (sys:relevantFor:xyz).
Until recently, heavy use of system tags would have caused such tags to appear in your post lists and in your tag cloud - often larger than other tags due to frequent use. We believe, that tag clouds should represent you and your interests rather than your habits. Therefore, several system tags are now hidden from both, tag cloud and post lists. As an example see the two tag clouds below.

The first one is the old version where no system tags are hidden, while the second one is what the cloud currently looks like. In the new cloud, the system tags

sent:anton (indicating that posts were sent to user anton) and
sys:relevantFor:kde (meaning a that posts were marked relevant for the group kde)

are hidden while the system tag myown appears in both clouds. Note, that the latter tag is not hidden since it not only makes posts appear on your CV page, but contains information about you as an author, which can be of relevance to you and other users as well. The other two tags simply provide functionality but are not informative as such. They have therefore been classified as hidden system tags.
In post lists (like on the home page or user post lists) hidden system tags are generally not displayed. However, on your own posts - if tagged with hidden system tags - you will find a small cog wheel symbol like here:

Hover with the mouse over the symbol and the system tags of that post will appear. Hidden system tags are also visible to you during any kind of post editing. Thus the functionality of such tags is ensured and stays transparent.

Happy (system) tagging!
Stephan

Feature of the Week: Password Buddies

2011-04-01T08:49:00.002+02:00

Lately, we've been working hard to improve BibSonomy's social features. With the recent release we introduced another unique feature that was not announced until now. Following the intuition that secrets are always shared among best friends, our idea is to connect you to people who have the same login password for BibSonomy as you.
This is an outstanding feature that other social networking sites lack up to now - usually, you only get buddies recommended by some black-box algorithm. Our solution is more targeted towards the idea that great minds think alike, and hence choose the same password.
So if you have the same password as other users in BibSonomy, you'll see them in the sidebar in the new "your password buddies" section:

Just have a look at your personal page to get to know your possible new buddies.

Please note that it is possible that some of your password buddies have another password than you because of the possible hash collisions of the MD5 algorithm. Unfortunately we can not solve this issue because we don't store the plain text password, but we are working on an extension of the MD5 algorithm that produces no collisions.

Happy secret sharing!
Your BibSonomy team

Release 2.0.13

2011-03-30T14:43:00.005+02:00

Today was our monthly release - 2.0.13. Despite unlucky number 13 BibSonomy is still running and includes now (next to some internal restructuring and optimization) the following features:

Delicious: Our importer for Delicious bookmarks and Tag-Bundles works now for all Delicious users (we added the functionality for those who use their Yahoo! accounts on Delicious).
System tags: Several system tags are now hidden and visible only to the owners of the according posts. They are also removed from the tag clouds .
RSS Feed: Bookmark RSS Feeds now contain a copy link for each bookmark to conveniently copy bookmarks to your own collection.

We hope you'll find the new features useful and look forward to your feedback.
Happy Tagging!
Stephan

Feature of the Week: API outputs JSON instead of XML

2011-03-29T11:06:00.002+02:00

In the last post we introduced a new parameter for our REST API. With the last release another new API feature was introduced which allows for a better usage of BibSonomy in browser based applications. The API is now able to output JSON. Instead of XML, all API request can be switched with the URL parameter format to return JSON. The JSON output of the last post's example with alphabetical ordered tags of the user beate can be accessed by the following request (you need your username and API key to access the URL):

http://www.bibsonomy.org/api/tags?user=beate&start=0&end=100&order=alph&format=json

If you would like to force the API to provide the XML version you need to change the parameter format to format=xml.

Another option to switch between the two output formats is the Accept parameter send to the server in the header of the HTML request. The screenshot below shows the typical XML output (top part of the figure) and parts of the request header (bottom). Besides the typical text/html format, the request asks for application/xml as one output option. If this is changed to application/json the API will send the answer in JSON format.

If you would like to try it yourself you can use the Firefox addon Modify Headers.

We hope you will find the new feature useful. Every feedback is very welcome.

Happy Tagging,
Andreas

Feature of the Week: Order parameter for API tag requests

2011-03-18T08:10:00.014+01:00

BibSonomy provides an API (Application Programming Interface) which other software programs can use to access the services and resources provided by BibSonomy. It is build on the REST (Representational State Transfer) architecture style and enables programs to post data (for example creating a new user), read data (for example getting the publications or tags of a user), updating or deleting data (for example one's own entries).

Recently, a new parameter for reading a user's tags was added. The parameter enables an alphabetical or frequency-based ordering of tags.

To get an alphabetical ordering add order=alph to your API request:

http://www.bibsonomy.org/api/tags?user=beate&format=xml&start=0&end=100&order=alph

Result:

To get a frequency-based ordering add the parameter order=frequency to your request:

http://www.bibsonomy.org/api/tags?user=beate&form at=xml&start=0&end=100&order=frequency

Result:

Feature of the Week: DOI Integration

2011-03-14T10:22:00.010+01:00

We are still improving the integration of the Digital Object Identifier System (DOI), which tackles the problem of referencing, among others, digitally published scientific publications. As already described in a previous post, you can store a reference to such a publication by selecting its DOI with your mouse somewhere on some web page and applying one of our bookmarklets "post bookmark" or "post publication":

You can, of course, also enter a DOI in the post publication dialog or by providing accordingly formatted BibTeX fields as described a an other blog post. Publication references in BibSonomy containing DOIs can be easily identified in every resource list, as the corresponding entries contain a direct link to the referenced resource:

With our last release, we additionally added the DOI link to the details page of each publication containing a digital object identifier, allowing to easily navigate to a resource of interest:

Stay tuned to learn more about new features and background information - Happy Tagging!

.folke

Feature of the Week: File-Upload

2011-03-03T15:53:00.013+01:00

One of the main advantages of organizing references in BibSonomy is the online availability of your collection. To facilitate your scientific workflow BibSonomy allows not only the storage of a publication's bibliographic data but also to attach a document - e. g., a private copy of the paper or your own personal notes - to your post.
Our last release included a general overhaul of this file upload feature.
It is now possible to store several documents with the same publication. Further, you can now upload your files either

directly during posting or while editing a post (click edit and then details to edit a post)

or on the posts details page (simply click on the title of one of your posts to get there).

To retrieve your documents go to the post's details page. Posts that have documents attached are marked with the document symbol on your myBibSonomy page. By clicking on the symbol you can download the first of your documents.

Note, that (mainly due to Copyright reasons) the uploaded documents are private. That is, they are available only to you and to the members of the groups that you have joined.

Release 2.0.12

2011-02-23T14:05:00.004+01:00

Today we updated BibSonomy to version 2.0.12. As always, the new libraries are at your disposal at our Maven repository. Next to various small bugfixes and internal restructuring the following features were included / updated:

File Upload: It is now possible to upload and attach several documents to one BibTeX-Post. Furthermore, the upload is enabled already in the posting dialogue as well as in the editing and detail views.
API: API-Requests for Tags now allow a new parameter, that specifies the order in that the tags are delivered. Currently, we support alphabetic order and order by frequency.
Date: We changed the behaviour of the dates of our posts. From now on, the date is set fix once the post is created and does no longer change with each update/editing of that post.

The next release (2.0.13) is scheduled for March 30th. If you have any feedback or comments regarding our new release, we would be happy to hear from you!

Best,
Stephan

Feature of the week: authentication

2011-02-18T12:07:00.001+01:00

With our latest Release 2.0.11 we migrated BibSonomy's authentication to Spring Security. In this post we want to give you some details and background information.

Remember Me

Before the last release you always got a cookie from BibSonomy after a successful login. This cookie contained your (hashed) password and user name and allowed you to stay logged in for one year. This was clearly security-relevant because when you forgot to log out on a shared computer, one could use your BibSonomy account and could even copy that cookie. Then, one could use it for an unlimited time (until you changed your password, actually) or run a password attack to obtain your plain-text password.

This cookie is now optional - you can use BibSonomy without getting this cookie (cf. this post). Furthermore, the cookie is now encrypted and contains a non-modifiable expiration date of one year. This means that password cracking is now much more complicated and the cookie always expires after one year. You can find more information in the Spring Security manual.

On the sign in page you can now decide whether you want this cookie set or not by (de)activating the stay logged in checkbox:

We recommend to not activate the checkbox when you are using a shared computer (e.g., in an internet cafe). Furthermore, you should always log out when you use such computers.

Note that by using the quick-login that you find in the top right corner of BibSonomy's pages (cf. the next screenshot) you always get the remember me cookie set.

OpenID

Though BibSonomy supports OpenID authentication for quite a while, the underlying implementation was rather buggy. Now, we are building upon Spring Security's implementation which has been tested in many production environments. Furthermore, we simplified the registration process for OpenID. Actually, if you sign in the first time with your OpenID you have to fill out one form and that's it. If your OpenID provider supports attribute exchange according to http://schema.openid.net/, some parts of the form are already filled by the user details you gave your OpenID provider.

LDAP & Co.

For the PUMA project (cf. this post) that is based upon BibSonomy technology we are using Spring Security's LDAP implementation to integrate PUMA into the University Library's user management.

For other setups we are now prepared - we can easily integrate X.509 or CAS authentication since Spring Security supports them out of the box. Other mechanisms can be added in a standardized way by implementing the corresponding interfaces.

New Release of BibSonomy Typo3 Plugin

2011-02-15T16:13:00.006+01:00

In many corporate and academic environments, Typo3 is a widely used Content Management System. Because including publication lists and tag clouds from BibSonomy directly into Typo3-based web pages is a frequent requirement, we are offering a Typo3-Plugin for BibSonomy since quite some time. Basically it makes it easy very easy to display BibSonomy content in various formats. Here are some examples of pages created with this plugin:

We are now happy to announce a new version of this plugin, namely 2.0.7. It is basically a bugfix release, including some enhanced layout options (e.g. specifying the width of publication/tagcloud columns). We recommend all users of the plugin to update to this version. It can be downloaded from here:

http://typo3.org/extensions/repository/view/ext_bibsonomy/current/

An extensive documentation (including two quickstart sections how to include a publication list / a tag cloud in your Typo3-based website) is also provided. Finally, we are - as usual - happy about any feedback how we can optimize the plugin according to your needs!

Best,

Dominik

New version 2.5 of JabRef Plugin available

2011-02-09T15:17:00.006+01:00

Since a while, we are offering a BibSonomy Plugin for JabRef, the latter being a popular application to manage BibTeX-files locally. The plugin basically combines the advantages of an online system like BibSonomy with the comfortable editing facilities of a local standalone client.

We are happy to announce version 2.5.1 of this plugin, which contains several bugfixes and interface improvements; in addition, the file handling (i.e. the management of PDFs associated to entries) has been worked over and is much smoother now. Have a look at the new version here:

http://www.bibsonomy.org/help/doc/jabref-plugin/index.html

The list of changes is is found here:

http://www.bibsonomy.org/help/doc/jabref-plugin/changes-report.html

and the direct download link is

https://gforge.cs.uni-kassel.de/frs/download.php/74/jabref-bibsonomy-plugin-2.5.1-bin.jar

We'd be happy about and comments or suggestions for improvements!

Best,

Dominik

Feature of the week: The 'myown'-checkbox

2011-02-04T10:04:00.008+01:00

As you may already know, you can use the keyword myown for tagging publications in BibSonomy, that were created by yourself. Those posts then appeared on your CV page under the publications section or within your publication list.

For making the meaning of this special tag more transparent and intuitive we added a checkbox to the edit publication form. Activating it adds myown as a tag to the selected post, while deactivation removes it.

Best practices on selecting entrytypes (bookmarks and publications) within BibSonomy

2011-01-26T14:42:00.009+01:00

While several specialized social sharing systems exist, a feature that distinguishes BibSonomy from most of them is that it combines two kinds of entrypes, namely bookmarks and publications. This was and is intentionally designed to support knowledge workers in keeping all relevant information (mostly web pages and scientific papers) in a single place. However, we're also observing some users which use only one of the entrytypes, e.g. only publications to keep their papers organized, or only bookmarks just like a "traditional" social bookmarking service.

In both latter cases, one might think that the other (unused) entry type may be experienced by those users a bit like a "millstone around the neck" - as most BibSonomy pages contain two columns, one for each entrytype. However, this is actually not the case - because BibSonomy allows a persistent individual selection which entry types are to be displayed. Simply click on your settings page, and you'll see two checkboxes

show bookmarks
show publications

as you can see here:

When unchecking one of them, you won't be bothered by the corresponding entries any longer. So in fact, this setting allows for a specification of BibSonomy into a "bookmark-only" or "publication-only" system. However, maybe even then there may be certain situations when one is interested in both entrytypes. We also offer a solution for that: On the top right corner of each page, you find the resource type switches:

When clicking on them, you can override the resource type selection from your user settings for the current page. The same is accomplished by appending the parameter resourcetype=bookmark and/or resourcetype=publication to the URL. Please note that this choice is not saved - once you reload the page without the parameter, your user settings will apply again.

Finally, there exist some pages which just don't make sense for certain entrytypes - e.g. the authors page cannot contain bookmark entries, as web pages usually don't have explicit authors. Currently, these cases are not yet checked automatically, but we rely on our user's perception of consistency in order to avoid incompatible parameter combinations. In summary, we hope to provide a good level of adaptation to each user's needs by these features - let us know if we can do better!

Release 2.0.11

2011-01-19T15:25:00.003+01:00

As announced, we released BibSonomy version 2.0.11 today. We also updated our publicly available libraries at our Maven repository. The new release contains various small bugfixes and internal restructurings which should make it run smoother and more efficiently; apart from that, we've included some new features:

Spring Security: BibSonomy now implements Springs access-control framework for the user authentication process. For you as BibSonomy user there are several smaller changes that come along with the new framework:
- The remember-me cookie (the cookie that keeps you logged in) is now optional. You can choose to stay logged in with a checkbox on the login-page. Note that using the login on the BibSonomy start page you will not get the cookie.
- The registration process for OpenId is now significantly easier.
- The registration link in the upper right corner has been removed. To register simply click sign in to get to the login page to find a registration link.
- The passwort-reminder has changed: After requesting a new password you will receive one that only allows you to change your password. Afterwards you'll have to use the regular sign in.
The BibSonomy URL now accepts a new parameter resourcetype. E. g. http://www.bibsonomy.org/json/?resourcetype=publication will retrieve publication posts. The other option is of cause resourcetype=bookmark.
When posting a publication that you are the author of, you can add the tag myown to it. As from now you can also use the checkbox "I am an author" in the editing dialogue edit publication - which adds the tag myown to the post. Note that this also causes those posts to appear on your CV page.
The publication details page shows a DOI link, if a DOI is available.
Two new scrapers are offered: The PNASScraper for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America and the ScienceMagScraper for the Science Magazine.
The photo you can upload on the settings page is now only scaled to 200 pixels for the longest side, if the longest side is larger than 200 pixels.

The next release (2.0.12) is scheduled for February 23h. If you have any feedback or comments regarding our new release, we would be happy to hear from you!

Best,
Stephan

What happened with the next release?

2010-12-21T14:22:00.002+01:00

... you might ask. Well, we postponed it to mid of January (actually, January 19th 2011). Basically, there are two reasons for that: we have construction works going on at our institute that caused some trouble and we migrated BibSonomy's authentication to Spring Security - an authentication and access-control framework.

This migration to Spring Security will be noticed by you - our users. The most obvious change will be the new "remember me" cookie that allows you to stay logged in for a longer time than the session timeout (which is 30 minutes of inactivity).
When the new version of BibSonomy is released, your old cookie is no longer valid and you need to login again. Hopefully, this causes not too much trouble. In any case - with this post we want to inform you about this change such that you are prepared. Of course, the password reminder functionality will be available such that you can reset your password in case you forgot it.

Some more background information about this change: Currently, you always got such a cookie when logging into BibSonomy. Beginning with the next release, you can choose whether you want to stay logged in after using BibSonomy or not:

Although we always recommend to logout on computers which are not your own, not enabling the "remember me" functionality ensures that a forgotten logout not necessarily allows other users of the computer to access your account. After a timeout of 30 minutes of inactivity your session is closed and you need to login again.

Besides the new cookies, Spring Security brings improved compatibility with OpenID providers, support for other authentication schemes (e.g., for the PUMA project we need LDAP authentication), and in general a cleaner and more widely tested authentication implementation.

There will be some other changes included in the next release that we will present with the accompanying blog post.

Since Christmas is coming, I am happy that I can announce that some features from our wishlist (see my last blog post) are now going to be implemented: an OpenSocial API and a TeXlipse plugin for BibSonomy. Finally, the new document upload is almost finished. It allows you to upload the documents (yes documents - not just one) for your publication while editing the post. I have tried this on our development system today and really liked it. I hope you will enjoy it, too.

Last but not least, we want to thank our users for using BibSonomy and our funders for giving us the opportunity to develop such an amazing system.

The whole BibSonomy team wishes you a merry Christmas and a happy new year.

Happy tagging!

Feature of the week: resizable sidebar and textarea

2010-11-22T19:19:00.012+01:00

This week we would like to present to you two new BibSonomy features. As already discussed in the last post we offer the opportunity of resizing the BibSonomy sidebar according to your wishes. In addition it is now possible to resize all text areas within the BibSonomy system.

Below we will demonstrate these new functionalites in more detail.

To resize the BibSonomy sidebar just hold down the mouse key on the resize anchor (see figure) and adjust the sidebar by moving the mouse.

To resize a textarea just hold down the mouse key on the bar at the bottom of the textarea (see figure) and adjust it by moving the mouse.

Release 2.0.10

2010-11-11T15:18:00.003+01:00

Since today, we're running BibSonomy version 2.0.10 on our servers. We also updated our publicly available libraries at our Maven repository. The new release contains various small bugfixes and internal restructurings which should make it run smoother and more efficiently; apart from that, we've included some new features:

"CV" page for groups: From some of you as our users, we received requests for a "CV-like" page for groups which lists all members and futher information like the group publications, bookmarks and tags. And voilà, here it is - check http://www.bibsonomy.org/cv/group/kde for an example.
Resizable Sidebar: Sometimes we've heard "BibSonomy's sidebar is too small", sometimes we've heard "BibSonomy's sidebar is too large" - so finally, you can choose yourself and resize the sidebar according to your wishes with the little handle in the top left corner of the sidebar.

The next release (2.0.11) is scheduled for November 24th. If you have any feedback or comments regarding our new release, we'd be happy to hear from you!

Best,
Dominik

2010-11-04T15:37:00.002+01:00

Dear Users,

once again we have to apologize for BibSonomy's downtime during Tuesday night from 11:47pm until 2:45pm (CET). We spend a lot of time, designing BibSonomy's server setup fail-safe. I will summarize our setup for short - on the one hand to explain to you what happened, on the other hand to present you our means for ensuring your data's integrity.

Whenever your browser communicates with BibSonomy, several requests are sent to our servers. Each request arrives at our so-called proxy-server which just delegates the request to our main server. For security reasons, the proxy-server is located in a separated network segment (a demilitarized zone).

Our main server hosts BibSonomy's actual web application as well as the main database, where all your posts are stored (as well as your document and profile pictures). The database is replicated on a separate server. Additionally, each night the database is stored using our university's backup facilities which are located in a different building (in a different city actually). Thus each data entry is stored at three different places and could be restored even in worst case scenarios. Of course are our servers backed up by according batteries which allow to bridge power-failures for up to 30 minutes. Furthermore, each system is monitored and our administrators (one of which I am) are informed using short text messages services.

The last downtime was caused by the proxy-server which stopped working from one moment to the other. We already prepared a replacement for the server and now we are testing to run two proxy-servers in parallel such that one server may crash without causing further downtime.

But our current 'big project' is to setup a complete BibSonomy installation in an other location (located in an other city) such that each of your browser's requests will be sent to it, if we should encounter any downtime here on our side.

I spared the bad news for the end of this post: Due to comprehensive renovations in our building, we prepare for the worst. We were assured that with a 99% probability our server room should not be affected. But we all know Murphy's law...
We were offered to the server room of an other department, which we currently prepare for hosting our servers.

I want to excuse any inconvenience which was caused by our server problems and I hope for you understanding if we should face a new problem during the two weeks. We have our next release readily waiting to be published but we postponed it until we know what the renovation work may cause.

Anyway I wish you happy posting,

.folke

Downtime today due to power failure

2010-10-25T14:15:00.004+02:00

Dear BibSonomy users,

as you probably noticed, BibSonomy had unfortunately a downtime today (Monday, Oct. 25th 2010) around 11:00 - 12:00 o'clock. It was due to a power failure in the computing center of the University of Kassel, which also affected the network infrastructure. This means that the BibSonomy server itself was still running smoothly, but not a single request from outside could reach it.

Right now everything is up and running again, and the server is again reachable for the world - we apologize deeply for any unpleasant experience during this time of unconnectedness.

Best regards,
Dominik

EKAW 2010 and New Ideas

2010-10-14T11:59:00.002+02:00

This week I and my colleague Andreas are participating at the EKAW 2010 conference in Lisbon, Portugal. On Monday we had a nice tutorial on ontology learning from folksonomies and in the meanwhile heard some interesting talks.

Semantic Pingback

One talk, namely Weaving a Social Data Web with Semantic Pingback by colleagues from the Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web Group at the University of Leipzig, particularly raised our attention.

The basic idea of pingback comes from the blogosphere and allows blog authors to get noticed when somebody links to their posts. Tramp et al. extend this well known technique with Semantic Web technologies to allow the pingbacked server to gain more information from the referencing web page than just the fact that an article has been references. E.g., one could state that someone knows the author.

Probably you already got the idea we got: BibSonomy could implement (semantic) pingback and therefore notify authors that one of their web pages (or even scientific publications) has been bookmarked in BibSonomy. The technology behind that is relatively simple such that I think we can implement it in the next weeks. Since BibSonomy already supports RDF export (for bookmarks and publications), it is automatically semantic pingback enabled!

This will then work out of the box with many blog software and in the case of semantic pingback with OntoWiki - but in principle any HTTP server could support pingback. Thinking one step further, publishers of scientific articles could support pingback to get feedback about the popularity of articles. Therefore, we maybe implement pingback for publications, too (technically, it makes no difference for us).

Linked Data

One thing I also learned from the Leipzig guys is that our content negotiation implementation to support the linked data idea needs to be fixed. Currently, only /uri/ path prefixes support content negotiation but all pages should support it. The rationale behind introducing the /uri/ prefix (as described in an earlier blog post) was that some browsers send an accept header containing "text/xml" on first position and therefore users would get XML instead of HTML which was not so nice. We will solve this problem by returning XML (or RDF+XML) only, when the requesting client exclusively requests this data format. Otherwise, we will always return HTML.

RDF output

That our RDF export according to the SWRC ontology is not perfect I did already know. I used the possibility to meet some Semantic Web experts to find out some errors we can easily fix. E.g., linking a publication's PDF using the owl:sameAs property is too strong - we will use some property from the Dublin Core ontology to do this better.

New Features (From our Wishlist)

Adding all the above ideas to our feature list, I again realized that this list is always way too long. It contains a lot of cool features we would - if we could - implement immediately, but we just don't have the resources to do so. To let you know what we think would be cool, here a quick list (really only a small part of the whole list): OAuth, OpenSocial, API versioning, fulltext search on your uploaded PDFs and bookmarked web pages, a TeXlipse plugin, ... Feel free to add more using BibSonomy's issue tracker.

New Features (In the Pipeline)

Finally, I can say that we are currently working on two cool features which will be released soon.

You will have much more freedom to configure your CV page because we are integrating a wiki renderer which basically allows you to add almost any content to the page.

Furthermore, we will introduce gold standard publication posts, i.e., posts which can be edited by several users to finally constitute a complete set of metadata for an article. For example, have a look at this resource which looks different than other resources in BibSonomy and that can serve as a gold standard for posts users want to create to reference that resource.
Additionally, gold standard posts can contain links to the articles the paper cites:

Thus we can represent the citation graph in BibSonomy.

OK, this was a pretty long blog post but I hope you enjoyed getting some news about what's going on "behind the scenes".

Feature of the week: New supported sites for posting publications

2010-10-12T11:37:00.005+02:00

As you may already know, you can post publications manually by entering the data yourself, you can copy posts while browsing the portal, you can use the post publication button or even the firefox plugin.

For those of you, who are interested in the technical details, i want to describe in the following section, what happens in the background. For the others the information, that we now support the Astronomy & Astrophysics site, might be sufficient.

So now for the details. As i already explained, we support a certain list of websites, where the listed publications can easily be scraped by using the buttons or firefox plugin mentioned above. For a complete list have a look here. The process of scraping can be explained as an automated process, that grasps the structure of a website and the data that is contained and uses this knowledge to extract the wanted information in a standardized way. Also see the BibSonomy help for more details.

So, as you can see, we steadily work on expanding our functionality in order to make the use of BibSonomy as comfortable as possible.

Feature of the Week: Conferator - a ubiquitous, BibSonomy-based conference service

2010-09-30T09:31:00.001+02:00

With Conferator, we offer a new service to conference participants which is supporting them in their social interaction. Conferator features two key functionalities: PeerRadar and TalkRadar.

PeerRadar will show you a history of your social contacts at the conference and provides additional information about them, such as their homepage, facebook and twitter accounts, contact details (skype, icq, etc.), and their last (public) posts in BibSonomy. After the conference, PeerRadar will thus enable you to recall your social contacts you had during the conference.
TalkRadar gives you the opportunity to personalize the conference schedule. You can select the talks that you intend to attend, and can store them in BibSonomy, so that it will be easier to cite them within your next publication. TalkRadar will give you more information about the current talk, such as additional information about the presenter, his or her publications, etc. It will also recommend upcoming talks. Last but not least, TalkRadar stores the talks that you have actually attended.

All conference participants who want to join the service will be provided with an RFID-Tag

that is worn like a name tag. The tags communicate to readers that are installed at the walls, and also communicate with each other. In this way, the system can determine the room you are actually in, and the people you are currently talking to (more precisely: the people who are face to face with you). The hardware we use was developed within the Sociopatterns project, whose generous support we kindly acknowledge.

The world premiere of Conferator will take place at the workshop week "Lernen - Wissen - Adaptivität (LWA 2010)" of four special interest groups of Gesellschaft für Informatik, the German Computer Science Association. LWA 2010 will take place October 4-6 in Kassel, organized by the Knowledge & Data Engineering Group of the University of Kassel. If you are nearby, please drop in and give it a try!

You can find more information about Conferator here.

Feature of the Week: 'Socializer'

2010-09-22T10:03:00.002+02:00

Today we released BibSonomy 2.0.9 containing mainly bug fixes and some more visibility for BibSonomy's social features:

We restructured the navigation links to the inbox, the basket, and the edit tags page. They are now not in one line at the top right corner of the header but in two lines. We are thinking of a larger restructuring of the navigation, but this needs some time.
We fixed an annoying bug: if you set your profile visible for friends only, you could not see your uploaded photo.
We added JSON support to our REST-API. This is experimental, not documented, and subject to change. If you want to try it: add an "Accept: application/json" header to your requests (e.g. this query) and you get JSON (in roughly the same format as the XML). Similarly, you can upload JSON using the "Content-Type" header.

The biggest change you will probably notice are the new buttons in the header and in the sidebar. On every user page (i.e., /user/USERNAME) you can now see the user's real name and a link to his or her CV - if both are visible to you. I.e., either the user's profile is public or visible for friends and you are his or her friend. For example, if I visit the page of my colleague Andreas Hotho, I get the following header:

Furthermore, in the sidebar the new socializer allows you to easily add a user as your friend, follow him, or get a personalized view of his posts.

The stars in the friends and follow buttons indicate, if you have added the corresponding user to your friend or follower list. In the example above, the user is my friend but I'm not following him.

As always, parts of the source code are available in our maven repository.

Feel free to test the new features and give us feedback!

Feature of the week: Automatic crossref linking

2010-09-20T14:32:00.005+02:00

As we all know, metadata is a little bit like muscles: Everybody wants to have it, but it's hard and tedious to create ;-) but of course, nice bibliographic tools can do a good job in helping you with your daily metadata workout. A built-in mechanism of BibTeX itself to alleviate the bibliographic metadata management is the crossref-mechanism: Typically, all BibTeX records of a certain event or journal (e.g. a conference or a workshop) share some metadata fields, e.g. the editor list or the ISSN. Instead of re-typing this common fields in each entry of the event, one can use the crossref-field and reference to a "parent" bibtex entry, which contains the common fields. When BibTeX processes the entries, all relevant fields are overtaken from there. Hence, one has to enter the common fields just once, instead of several times for each entry.

As an example, the following entry:

http://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/2dc2bfb649e4b0ffe2da37e9e25e0404e/jaeschke

crossreferences this entry:

http://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtexkey/eisterlehner2009ecmlpkdd

So far, all the magic is done by BibTeX itself. But since the latest release, BibSonomy helps you to keep track of who references whom: On the BibTeX details page of an entry which contains a crossref field, we introduced a link to the crossreferenced entry at the top:

This neat little feature is meant to assist you in getting the most out of BibTeX and finally to enhance your everyday efficiency in dealing with your bibliographic collection. Have fun!

Feature of the Week: A picture for your CV

2010-09-07T18:00:00.004+02:00

For the German LWA conference our institute is hosting in October we are using BibSonomy as central tool to manage the accepted papers. We also offer interesting services to the conference participants which are partially based on BibSonomy.

Therefore, we released some intermediate features today in a smaller release (the next regular release is scheduled for September 22th):

Publications having a crossref field are now linked to the BibTeX key that is referenced. E.g., this post references the post with the key eisterlehner2009ecmlpkdd.
On BibSonomy's web pages the authors of a post are now separated by "," (instead of "and"). Only the last author is separated by "and".
All textareas now have a bar at the bottom with that you can resize them.
You can now enter an "institution" for your profile which also appears on the CV page.
Two new links in your myBibSonomy menu: myPrivatePosts and myCV.
And last but not least: you can now upload a photo for your CV.

Longer explanations of those new features will follow in the next weeks, for now I will quickly explain how to upload a photo for your CV.

Just go to the settings page and there to the section a picture for my cv. With the file choose dialog select a photo from your local file system which shall represent you in BibSonomy. Then press the upload button. The photo is then visible on your CV page - for you only, for your friends or for everybody - depending on the setting of profile viewable for on the settings page. Here you can see as an example Andreas' CV:

Feature of the Week: Export Bookmarks to "electronic"-BibTeX

2010-09-03T15:37:00.005+02:00

In our previous post we have discussed six new BibTeX entry types that have been implemented in BibSonomy. This time we will focus on one of those types: “electronic”. The type "electronic" allows you to store references to resources on the web as BibTeX.

Of course the more natural (and comfortable) way of storing references to such resources in BibSonomy is using bookmarks. To make those bookmarked references available as BibTeX we have included a BibTeX export for bookmarks:

Simply add “/bookbib” to any BibSonomy URL to get BibTeX entries of all bookmarked resources of the page. For example while http://www.bibsonomy.org/tag/puma shows you a collection of bookmarks and publications with the tag “puma” http://www.bibsonomy.org/bookbib/tag/puma
will give you all BibTeX entries to all the bookmarked resources of said collection.

Here is an example of such a bookmark exported to BibTeX:

@electronic{puma.uni-kassel.de,
title = {PUMA :: home},
url = {http://puma.uni-kassel.de/},
biburl = {http://www.bibsonomy.org/url/e51e87299fc3778064426991cb36633d/sdo},
keywords = {PublicationManagement kassel puma webService},
added-at = {2010-09-03T15:35:58.000+0200},
description = {Puma erleichtert Ihre tägliche Arbeit mit Publikationen und Lesezeichen},
interhash = {e51e87299fc3778064426991cb36633d},
intrahash = {e51e87299fc3778064426991cb36633d}
}

The referenced URL is naturally stored in the “url” field of the entry. The URL's host serves as BibTeX key. The fields “title” and “description” are determined by the title and description of the corresponding BibSonomy bookmark post. As usual “keywords” holds the post's tags, “added-at“ tells you when the the post was added (or last modified) and “biburl” is the link to the bookmark-post.

We are looking forward to any suggestions of further BibTeX fields that could be included in the export.

Feature of the Week: New BibTeX Entry types

2010-08-20T14:30:00.017+02:00

When a publication is posted to BibSonomy one of the most important fields of that post is the publication's entry type. There are 14 regular BibTeX entry types - e. g. “article” or “book” being the most common ones.

BibSonomy has supported 13 of those types and in our last release we have added the missing 14th: “conference”.

Over time, there has been great demand for a new BibTeX entry type that allows posting presentations. We are happy to announce that “presentation” is one of six new non-regular (!) entry types, that we have implemented in BibSonomy. Here is a list of the new types:

electronic: references electronic publications like articles on the web or blog posts
patent: references patent documents
periodical: references magazines or other regularly appearing publications
preamble: references preambles
presentation: references slides from your talks, seminars or lectures
standard: references documents describing norms, guidelines, etc.

The new types can be selected during the publication posting.
Our system tag “sys:entrytype:” can help you search for publication posts of a desired type. E. g. searching for “sys:entrytype:standard” returns only publications of type “standard”.
One final remark before you start posting your new BibTeX type posts: Those six new types are non-regular types. That means, they are used in BibSonomy and other applications but they do not belong the the 14 canonical types that are usually understood by all BibTeX styles. Depending on what style you use for your literature references you might sometimes have to adjust either the entry type of the reference or the BibTeX style.

Feature of the Week: BibSonomy and Ubiquitous Barcode Posts

2010-08-15T21:45:00.009+02:00

The issue of this week introduces a feature that is especially helpful for users of BibSonomy who often use mobile devices. Then, it is often the case that an interesting book (with a barcode) needs to be bookmarked. Using an appropriate barcode scanner application, this step can be conveniently (semi-)automated, for a more 'ubiquitous' BibSonomy experience!

Below, we will demonstrate this with an Android application, however, this can probably also be accomplished using similar devices.

1) First of all, you need a suitable barcode scanner. For that (and for my Android phone) I applied the well-known "Barcode Scanner" application. With this app, scanning a barcode is easy, as shown below.

2) After scanning, you need to initiate the product search in order to gain access to the publication data.

3) If the Bibsonomy settings have not yet been added to the system, you need to configure the 'custom search URL', in the settings menu. Otherwise, skip to Step 4.

4) Next, query the configured (BibSonomy) custom search provider.

5) Finally, you can tweak retrieved publication data in the usual BibSonomy edit dialog. The screenshot below shows the 'normal' dialog, however, we are currently working on a mobile version of the BibSonomy user interface in order to enhance the user experience for mobile devices.

In my opinion, this is a really cool feature! So, play around with it, and we are happy to get your comments, suggestions, and further ideas.

Feature of the week: Configurable displayed resources

2010-08-09T14:43:00.009+02:00

Today we are going to introduce the small new feature that allows you to preselect the resources which are shown at our resource pages.

In general when you look at our homepage you see both resources, bookmark and publication.
There you have the option to fade out one of them by clicking on one of the symbols at the top right over the publications.

But every time you reload the site you have to redo your selection.
Now you have the option to preselect the resource of your interest at your settings page

When you deselect one of the resources and go back to our homepage only the selected resource is shown.

Of course you have also the possibility to fade the other resources back in by clicking at one of the previous mentioned buttons at the top right.

We did it again...

2010-07-29T10:43:00.005+02:00

We just released BibSonomy's version 2.0.8.

The new release mostly incorporates small bug fixes and some feature enhancements. Some improvements will be visible, such as the possibility to export your bookmarks to BibTeX-Entries on each bookmark list.

We also extended the list of supported BibTeX entry types which now consist of

article
book
booklet
conference
electronic
inbook
incollection
inproceedings
manual
mastersthesis
misc
patent
periodical
phdthesis
preamble
presentation
proceedings
standard
techreport
unpublished

We continuously look at our log files for spotting possible bugs - but we need your help for steadily improving BibSonomy. If you happen to encounter a bug or have an idea for a new feature, please don't hesitate inform us (email).

Apart from updating the running system we've updated our Maven repository with the latest version of our open-source libraries.

Stay tuned to our next release planned for the end of September!

Best,
.folke

Feature of the week: References to tag pages in the sidebar

2010-07-22T17:25:00.012+02:00

As of the last release there are some small changes in the sidebar, namely in the section where you find the references to other tag-related pages. You may already know that there are links to both tag pages and concept pages, for all users and for the requested user/group or logged-in user, respectively.
What's new is that we have added a counter for the posts and you can see subtags of a concept when pointing on the latter. Also, usually in those cases where the linked page would contain no posts at all, the link is hidden.

Let me show you how it works by using an example. The search for 'linux' as a concept yields this sidebar. (Here you can find a reminder of what concepts and relations are.) Note that the counter is only visible when the user is logged in. Here, there is no link to the user-tag page, because the user 'ak' does not have any posts tagged with 'linux'. Neither does this user have a relation where 'linux' is the supertag, so the link to the user's concept page is hidden, too.

Of course, you can search for more than one keyword. As an example, consider the search for both 'mathematics' AND 'algebra' as tags, which yields the following sidebar. The search term is split up into the single keywords and for each one there is a link to the corresponding concept page (if the result set is not empty) and there is one link for the whole search term (although this query might yield zero posts). You may expect a reference 'algebra as concept from ak', but like in the previous example, the user 'ak' has no relation in which 'algebra' is the supertag, so this link does not appear.

Feature of the week: simple and advanced modus

2010-07-09T17:00:00.023+02:00

This week we would like to present to you a small new feature, which you can use to adjust the appearance of your "edit-bookmark" and "edit publication"
page. To be more specific, on your "settings-page" you can choose between two modes, the "simple" and the "advanced" one.

settings page

In the "advanced mode" all options of the "edit-bookmark" and
"edit publication" page are displayed, whereas in the
"simple mode" some expert options are hidden. These expert options would for example be the "viewable for" and the "relevant for" fields, which you can use to determine which group your post is available and interesting for.

edit-bookmark page: simple modus

edit-bookmark page: advanced modus

edit-publication page: simple modus

edit-publication page: advanced modus

The default setting of existing users is the "advanced mode". New users get the "simple mode" by default.

New Release: BibSonomy 2.0.7

2010-07-02T12:24:00.011+02:00

We are still on track with our monthly release cycle. Two days ago we released BibSonomy's version 2.0.7. Since then we accurately looked at our log files to spot potential bugs as soon as possible. This release of BibSonomy mainly consists of internal code cleanup and restructuring as preparatory work for pending new features. Additionally we addressed some minor bug fixes. Nevertheless you will notice some improvements:

On your user settings page you can configure for most resource lists (e.g., in search results) which resource types (bookmarks and/or publications) should be displayed.
Also on your user settings page you can hide certain advanced features, which are relevant only to BibSonomy's power users.
Your exported BibTeX-snippets now contain a field which indicates the date you posted the corresponding entry to BibSonomy.
Most tag related pages (e.g., user-tag pages) contain on the sidebar's beginning references to corresponding tag or concept pages which now also contain counts for the correspondingly matching posts.

Apart from that, we've updated our Maven repository with the latest version of our open-source libraries. We're always happy to see other people using BibSonomy features! As usual, if you encounter any strange behaviours or errors, we are grateful for a little email notice, and we'll do our best to fix the issues. In any case have fun with the new release and stay tuned to our next release planned for July 28th!

Best,
.folke

Feature of the week: New help pages

2010-06-25T17:30:00.013+02:00

As some of you may already have noticed, BibSonomy has a new help page, which provides you with the information needed for exploiting the riches of our platform. Our main focus was the improvement of the design and usablility. The content itself has not changed much though. So next to the new interface description section, where all views are explained to you in details, you will find the new accordion style in large text sections coming in handy, because it offers you a much better overview:

E.g., have a look at our guide for your first steps within BibSonomy.

Another new feature is that you can now use the translation functionality. So if you want to read the help of a certain page in German, just click on the appropriate flag at the bottom of the content area and you will directly see the text in the requested language. You can find the new help pages under the very same address as the existing ones, so all your previous bookmarks will still get you, where you expect them to link to - or at least very close, so finding the content you need won't be much of a problem.

For the technically interested BibSonomy-blog readers: We constructed this help with a JSPWiki in the background and adapted it for our needs.

Feature of the week: The new System Tag sys:title:tag allows for partial Search

2010-06-14T11:23:00.005+02:00

Today we introduce a small new feature which will hopefully be useful for you as our user. In one of the last releases we introduced the new system tag sys:title:tag.

As one can guess from the name of the system tag, it can be used to search for a word (only one word) in the title field of publications. An example search for the word "Restful" is http://www.bibsonomy.org/tag/sys:title:Restful. Searching for two words is possible as well by using the system tag twice. As you can see from the URL the search is made over the entire database. The system tag can be used in the user environment, too. Again we look for "Restful" but in this case for the user hotho: http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/hotho/sys:title:Restful. This two search request are not really novel but for the system tag we added the possibility to use the wildcard *. By adding * at the end of a word or even of a part of a word a search for the beginning is made. An example could be the search "Rest*" in the collection of the user hotho http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/hotho/sys:title:Rest* and it works for the entire database as well.

For interested users: To make this feature available we setup a special index in the search part of our system. Lucene is the basis of our search engine framework which is very fast for search engine like queries and allows for partially search requests, too. With the help of the system tag we redirect the request to the corresponding index. We use the system tag internally for other features like the auto completion but this will be the topic of one of the next features of the
week. In the near future we will be able to offer more system tags as we are currently working on a new framework for such tags.

Feature of the Week: The CV page

2010-06-02T16:05:00.007+02:00

For enhancing the social features of Bibsonomy, the system now features a CV page, powered by PUMA, a German DFG-funded project.

While the feature will soon be improved and prominently included in the upcoming social features menu, currently it is available using the myCV link (in the myBibSonomy menu) and can be enabled for each user (URL).

An examplary CV page is shown below:

The page information, i.e., the "profile" can be customized via the settings options of your account. As an example, consider the settings page below:

The "profile viewable for" option controls the accessibility to the profile: "friends" only allows users marked as friends to view the profile, while "public" enables public access to the CV.
As shown above, the CV contains some personal information, scientific interests, hobbies, and bookmarks and publications marked with the "myown" tag.

Planned extensions concern the upload and display of a user image; additionally, we plan to extend the CV page with wiki-features, such that arbitrary information can be added in a flexible way.

Feel free to play around with the feature, and we are happy to get your comments, suggestions, and further ideas for the CV page!

BibSonomy 2.0.6 up and running

2010-05-28T13:23:00.005+02:00

As announced roughly one month ago, we are currently establishing a monthly release cycle. We're sure you couldn't wait - since this week, you can experience our latest release. We are running version 2.0.6 right now, and hope it makes your BibSonomy experience even better!

We've fixed several bugs (some scraper issues, problems when searching autors, and other minor fixes) and cleaned up internally some code; besides that, there are some new features:

When posting a publication, we now offer an autocompletion in the 'title'-field, which matches against all publications in our database. If you find the right one, you'll get the rest of the metadata (authors, year of publication, ..) such that you don't have to retype that stuff again.
In order to prevent misuse of our system, we now integrated an activation email in the BibSonomy registration process; you can't have access to our system until you've clicked that link.
As we're all humans, errors occur naturally during editing a publication (e.g., a forgotten author). We've worked over the way how these errors are presented to you - now the error message automatically disappears as soon as you type something into the correct field

Apart from that, we've updated our Maven repository with the latest version of our open-source libraries. We're always happy to see other people using BibSonomy features!

As usual, if you encounter any strange behaviours or errors, we are grateful for a little email notice, and we'll do our best to fix the issues. In any case have fun with the new release and stay tuned to our next release planned for June 30th!

Best,
Dominik

Feature of the Week: The new publication editing dialogue

2010-05-21T15:07:00.005+02:00

Our latest major release brought up completely redesigned publication posting and editing dialogues. The changes in the underlying backend system are even bigger than you as end-user might notice. With this week's feature I want to introduce the new dialogue for editing publications.

You can test the dialogue yourself, by copying this post. The emerging web page will look similar to this screenshot where I have highlighted the five main parts I will explain in the following:

general information

This box contains the main fields you must fill out for every publication in BibSonomy: entry type, BibTeX key, title, author(s) or editor(s), and year. For the entry type you can choose among a list of the types supported by BibTeX, i.e., "article", "proceedings", "phdthesis", etc. The BibTeX key uniquely identifies the publication reference in your document and is used to cite the reference (e.g., with the \cite{key} command in LaTeX).

The small blue button next to the BibTeX key allows you to generate a new key - if the one which has been extracted is not easy to remember, for example. We use the first author's last name, the year and the first longer word from the title to generate the key. In the example above the generated key would be "haveliwala2003topicsensitive".

groups

The following two boxes entitled viewable for and relevant for are part of BibSonomy's support for (research) groups.

viewable for

You can restrict which users can see this post. Either everybody ("public"), only you ("private"), or your friends ("friends"). If you are member of a research group, you can also allow only members of the group to see the post. We will soon allow posts to be visible for several such groups.

relevant for

As member of a group you can explicitly state that the post is relevant for this group. Such posts then appear on the /relevantfor page, e.g., for the group kde on the page /relevantfor/group/kde.

More on this feature in this blog post.

detailed information

All other metadata that belongs to a publication is stored in these fields. Note that only the fields that the typical styles for BibTeX use for the selected entry type are shown. You can show all fields by clicking on the respective link at the top of this box.

comments and notes

Here you can enter personal notes or comments about the publication. Why three fields for that?
Well, the first field (description, comment) is not a feature of BibTeX but the description field every post has in BibSonomy - also the bookmarks. Just enter your notes, comments, thoughts on the publication into this field.
The second field (private note) contains your private comments - only you can see its contents.
And the third field (note) is used by BibTeX. Typically, everything you write there is inserted into the publication reference in your literature list.

scraper information

Actually, sometimes there is a sixth box that is not shown in the above overview screenshot:

This box only appears if you used one of our screen scrapers to post a publication to BibSonomy directly from another digital library like the ones from IEEE or ACM.

The box shows you which scraper extracted the data from which URL and how the extracted BibTeX entry looks like.

To sum up ...

In our opinion, the new dialogue is much cleaner and easier to use than the old one. All the important facts about a publication are grouped together at the top of the page. Furthermore, now the two dialogues for editing bookmarks and publications have a consistent layout which eases usage of the system.
Feel free to comment. We are very interested in what you think about the new layout.

Feature of the Week: The Inbox

2010-05-11T16:07:00.022+02:00

Have you ever tagged a publication or website in BibSonomy that you'd have liked to show to a fellow user? BibSonomy now offers a simple way to do exactly that with the new inbox!

Let's say Anton has a nice post, that (he thinks) Berta should know about. Hence Anton tags his post with „send:Berta“ and the post will be sent to Berta's inbox. To let Anton know, that the post was delivered the tag changes from „send:Berta“ to „sent:Berta“.
The next time Berta logs on to BibSonomy, she notices the counter in the upper right corner that tells her, she's got a new post in her inbox.She is curious and clicks on the counter to get to her inbox. There she finds the post Anton has forwarded to her, only her post is tagged with „from:Anton“ to let her know who sent it.

Note that the post has not been added to Berta's regular post collection yet. Berta can now decide to keep the post permanently and therefore use the copy link below the post. When the inbox post has served its purpose it can be deleted from the inbox with the remove link below the post.
Berta could also decide to delete all her inbox posts at once using the „clear inbox“ link in the sidebar.

To protect our users from spam we have restricted the use of the send tag. I. e. Anton is allowed to send his post to Berta only if

there exists a BibSonomy group that both Anton and Berta are members of or
Berta has added Anton as her friend.

Note, that the latter is not the same as „Anton has added Berta as his friend“.
It is our hope, that this new feature will help you to actively communicate interesting sources to your friends and colleagues.

Feature of the week: TagCloud

2010-05-03T13:25:00.021+02:00

Today we gonna present you the brand new TagCloud, implemented in the
newest BibSonomy release. While using BibSonomy your TagCloud grows bigger and bigger and easily becomes unattractive. To avoid this fact and additionally give you a better view about your most used tags, the new TagCloud will now be able to show only the top X tags of you. Where X can be set in your settings page and has an default value of 50 (Pic. 1).

Pic. 1: Your new TagCloud settings.

So this means instead of a 2-page long TagCloud, you will have a small and clear TagCloud containing your top tags (Pic. 2 & 3).
Of course you can still use the old TagCloud, if you feel fine with your current TagCloud behaviour and dont want to change it. The TagCloud can be set back to the old behaviour in your settings page by setting choice of tags to min Frequency.

Let's see it in action:

Old	New
Pic. 2: old TagCloud.	Pic. 3: new TagCloud.

Today's release 2.0.5

2010-04-28T14:06:00.001+02:00

Starting today, we want to establish a monthly release cycle, releasing a new version of BibSonomy on the Wednesday before the last Thursday of the month.

The latest release fixes some bugs, e.g., on the newly introduced inbox, title-/description-autocompletion when posting bookmarks, adding/removing user's from groups, and various scrapers (IOP, APS, etc.).

New features include

The sidebar on the start page now shows the latest blog posts.
There is a tag cloud for full-text searches available.
The author-tag pages now show related tags.

We also updated the source code in our Maven repository to version 2.0.5.

The next release is scheduled for Wednesday, May 26th, 2010.

2010-04-23T07:39:00.008+02:00

Feature of the week: Relations

The last major release included some overhaul on the relations-page.
Everything is now better-arranged and more beautiful. Especially the representation of the sets of subtags as tagclouds improves clarity. The tagsize of a subtag indicates the frequency with which it is used in relation with its supertag. A counter on each tag tells that frequency exactly. Respectively, counter and tagsize of a supertag tell you how many of our users consider this tag a concept.

For those of you wondering what relations are and how to use them:
In BibSonomy, a relation consists of two tags, SUBTAG -> SUPERTAG. On the relations-page you'll find e. g. the following relation: 'algebra' -> 'mathematics'. It means that 'mathematics' is the supertag (also called a concept) of 'algebra', and the relation could be read as 'algebra is a subdiscipline of mathematics'.

You can define and manage your own relations on the edit_tags-page. Or you can enter a relation in the tag field while posting or editing a bookmark/publication. Just use SUBTAG->SUPERTAG (without any white space) as a tag.

As a matter of fact, relations are quite a useful tool in retrieving resources.
Let's stay with our example. Say you are interested in posts to the field of 'mathematics'. Then searching for 'mathematics' as a tag will find you all the posts explicitly tagged with 'mathematics'. Searching for 'mathematics' as a concept, however, will find in addition all the posts tagged with a subtag thereof (in our case e. g. algebra).

Furthermore, you will be able to distinguish whether you are interested in relations of only one specific user or in everybody's relations via
http://www.bibsonomy.org/concept/tag/CONCEPTNAME
vs.
http://www.bibsonomy.org/concept/user/USERNAME/CONCEPTNAME.
Of course, navigation via hyperlinks is also possible! Try e. g. clicking on a conceptname on the relations-page and then note the sidebar.

Relations allow you to widen your search and tag in your own hierarchical way.
So give it a try!

Feature of the week: DOI

2010-04-20T11:00:00.007+02:00

Since BibSonomy is available, it is possible to add DOI to publications. However, these has not been used in the system. But recently we implemented a tighter integration of DOI links into BibSonomy. As you may already know, a DOI name uniquely identifies a digital resource over its lifetime. In addition, the DOI-System provides an up-to-date URL for the resource. BibSonomy now checks if the publication reference contains a DOI. If this is the case a "DOI-link" is automatically created in the publication list. If this is not the case the DOI name can be inserted into the "misc fields". The DOI entry always needs to have the following format:

doi = {DOI name} (for example "doi = {doi:10.1145/1379092.1379123"})
doi = {URL/DOI name} (where the URL points to a DOI resolver and leaving out the term "doi:" in the DOI name) (for example "doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1379092.1379123"}.

Have fun with this new feature !

Feature of the week: New system tag enables you to filter publications by their entry type

2010-04-09T13:26:00.007+02:00

I am glad to present to you a new way to filter publications within a BibSonomy search. As you may already know publications can be classified by their type - there are books, articles, proceedings, etc. BibSonomy currently supports 12 types of publications:

article
book
booklet
inbook
incollection
inproceedings
mastersthesis
misc
phdthesis
proceedings
techreport
unpublished

When adding a publication to your BibSonomy account manually, the first thing to decide is what type of entry it is. No fixed classification scheme can be complete, but BibTeX provides enough entry types to handle almost any reference reasonably well.

With our new feature of the week we introduce a new system tag, that filters publications
by their entry type. The general structure of this tag is as follows:

sys:entrytype:type

The variable type can be one of the elements listed above, so that the whole tag might be for example sys:entrytype:masterthesis.

This enables you to create your own publication lists for your website ordered by entry types. If you are not familiar with this, you can find helpful instructions here.

Digging up Resources - Fulltext search in BibSonomy

2010-02-19T13:27:00.006+01:00

Background:
For a while now we were redesigning BibSonomy's full text search backend and now we decided that it is mature enough for mastering all of BibSonomy's search requests.

Our old backend was based on MySQL, using the MyISAM storage engine. But with all your Posts enlarging the search index each day, we nearly reached our server's capacity. Looking for a more efficient way of implementing full text search, we stumbled upon Lucene, a highly optimized search engine library, which is incorporated by the Apache Jakarta Project family since September 2001.

Now all of BibSonomy's full text search queries are handled by two redundant Lucene indexes, which are alternatively updated every 5 minutes.

Impact on your daily "BibSonomy-Experience":
First of all, switching to Lucene was an important step for preparing our servers to deal with even more users joining the BibSonomy community, as the search task now is separated and can be distributed among several independent machines. Secondly we hope to decrease BibSonomy's already small response time. But finally we now support more sophisticated search queries like "collaborative AND (b*marking OR ressource*)".

If you have any suggestion or encounter any problem, please contact us.

Happy Tagging!

Stop thinking, start tagging - Tag Semantics emerge from Collaborative Verbosity

2010-02-05T07:25:00.006+01:00

Maybe you've asked yourself from time to time "What are these BibSonomy developers doing the whole day?" Of course the first answer is simple - we develop BibSonomy :) - but apart from that, most of us are researchers, running experiment, discussing results, writing papers - and the latter is sometimes rewarded: Our work "Stop thinking, start tagging - Tag Semantics emerge from Collaborative Verbosity" got accepted at this year's WWW conference in Raleigh, USA!

As you can guess from the title, the paper is basically concerned with emergent semantics. This term is often used to describe semantic structures that "grow" in a bottom-up and uncontrolled manner within collaborative tagging systems. For the case of emergent tag semantics this means that despite people are free to choose arbitrary tags (which leads to typical language-related phenomenons like homonymy, polysemy, ..), one can successfully extract meaningful tag relations from the aggregated mass of tagged content. As an example, different people might use different tags to describe the web2.0 paradigm, possibly "web2.0", "web-2.0", "webtwo", "web20", "web.2.0", and many others. By using the appropriate tag relatedness measures, one can identify those cases and extract a semantic "concept" web2.0 which all these users are talking about.

Up to this point, there's nothing too new - the question we asked ourselves then was how the characteristics of individual users influence the quality of the learned semantic structures. One possibility is to distinguish users according to their tagging motivation into "Categorizers" and "Describers" - the first group uses a small and systematic vocabulary, wherby the latter uses a wealth of different keywords for annotation. Simply spoken, describers can be seen as the "verbose" users tagging with many keywords. So we splitted up the whole folksonomy dataset into several partitions containing different mixtures from categorizers and describers. And here is an interesting thing we found:

On the x-axis, you see the percentage of included users. The y-axis depicts the quality of the inferred semantic tag relations (measures by grounding against a thesaurus; as we used the JCN distance, smaller values indicate better quality). The green line depicts the semantic quality obtained from the full dataset. The interesting thing is now that already with 40% of the "talkative" describers, one can reach the semantic precision of the full dataset! The best quality is found for 70% of describers. So the claim that "mass matters" holds only partially - a crucial aspect seems to be from which kind of users the mass is composed. The collaborative verbosity of describers seems to have a positive effect on the emergent semantics. On a more general level, this exhibits a causal link between tagging pragmatics (how people tag) and tag semantics (what tags mean). If you're interested in further details, we'd be happy to discuss with you on WWW2010!

2010-01-29T09:19:00.019+01:00

Feature of the week: New Firefox-plugin released!

For some weeks now the first version of our BibSonomy-Firefox-Addon is available for Download.
This new feature integrates your BibSonomy bookmarks into your Firefox browser, thus offering comfortable use and storage of your bookmarks without visiting your BibSonomy account. You might also want to synchronize your list of local bookmarks with the ones in BibSonomy.
All you need to get started is the new plugin, your user name and your API-key as password.

The blue star button indicates whether or not a page is already bookmarked. Clicking it opens the dialogue for storing or changing the bookmark of the current web page.

To the left in your navigation bar you'll find the quick link to your BibSonomy page and the hide/show button for the sidebar.
The sidebar displays the cloud or list of your bookmark's tags and your tag relations. Much like in BibSonomy bookmarks are retrieved by clicking on one of its tags or using the full-text search.

Our Addon is fully customizable and also allows to remove the standard yellow Firefox-Star-button from the browser. Moreover the settings feature the option to import your Firefox bookmarks into BibSonomy and vice versa.

New Release

2010-01-20T11:42:00.001+01:00

Yesterday we deployed a new release which mainly contains bugfixes and a big cleanup in the underlying database module. It already contains the backend methods for some new features, e.g., the Inbox. During this week we will also try to switch the full text search to Lucene.

A small new feature which has been added is the layoutinfo JSON which provides metadata about the available JabRef layouts (you can see this currenly on the export page). This will be used by our Typo3 plugin to provide a selection of available layouts.

Feature of the week: 2009 in review

2009-12-16T16:55:00.001+01:00

2009 brought many improvements and new features for BibSonomy but also interesting research activities. We briefly review this year before next week's post gives an outlook on 2010.

Tag Recommendations: As part of the ECML PKDD 2009 conference we organized the Discovery Challenge, where the participants could test their tag recommendation methods on a BibSonomy dataset. A particularly interesting part of the challenge was the online evaluation which allowed the researchers to evaluate their approaches in the running system and actually show their recommendations to our users. The underlying infrastructure was provided by our new tag recommendation framework which proved to be very useful. It allowed us to distribute the tag recommendation work over several machines located all over the world. E.g., the winner's recommender was running in Canada.
Research Projects: Two new projects centered around BibSonomy started this year: PUMA, which will improve academic publication management in cooperation with the University Library Kassel, and Info 2.0 (in German), which investigates chances and risks of the Web 2.0 with respect to informational self-determination in cooperation with the Institute for Public Law.
Plugins: We released three new plugins which better integrate BibSonomy with other tools. The JabRef plugin allows you to synchronize your publication references with the bibliography manager JabRef and the Typo3 extension integrates publication lists from BibSonomy into the content management system Typo3. Just released two weeks ago and ready for testing is the new Firefox add-on which better integrates BibSonomy into the Firefox web browser. We will introduce this add-on in one of the next FOTWs.
Personalization: You now see similar users in your sidebar on which you can click to surf their posts in a personalized ranking. Furthermore, you can follow users you find interesting to stay tuned on what they post.
Dumps of the Dataset: Since quite some time we offer a dataset of the BibSonomy database in form of an SQL dump for research purposes to interested people. A web page now describes the available dumps and how to get one. Newly, the dumps also contain the users' tag relations.
Development: In an ongoing effort to open the BibSonomy source code to the public, we released some of the core modules in a public Maven repository. E.g., now you have access to our screen scrapers, which allow you to extract publication metadata from more than 60 digital libraries. Most modules have a GPL or LGPL license.

Next week we will present our current activities and discuss the plans for 2010.

Feature of the Week: New version of JabRef-plugin released!

2009-11-12T11:12:00.010+01:00

As you will have noticed, we are maintaining a plugin for the open-source bibliography manager JabRef, which allows to easily download and upload entries from BibSonomy. We believe that this approach nicely combines the advantages of maintaining a local BibTeX-file with the comfort and usefulness of a centralized publication sharing platform like BibSonomy.

We have just now released a new version of this plugin, which offers some nice features to ease the maintenance of both collections (local + within BibSonomy)! Check it out:

Added document management: In JabRef and within BibSonomy, it is possible to attach a private copy (PDF, PS, ...) to a publication entry. The new version of our plugin allows to download all your private documents present in BibSonomy by a single click (first image). Furthermore, you can control in the settings menu that local documents are automatically uploaded to BibSonomy when you storethe publication (second image).

Automatic Synchronization: A typical problem is to keep both collections (your local .bib file and your BibSonomy account) synchronized. We are proud to offer a comfortable feature to automatically perform this task (third image on the right). This feature automatically checks for entries present in both collections if they are equal; if there is a difference, you can decide which version to keep. A 'diff-like' view helps you to see what has changed (4th image on the right).

Full-text search: In prior versions, it was only possible to retrieve posts from BibSonomy by tag. Now you can also perform a full-text search in your personal or in the global collection.
Further small additions & bugfixes: Apart from the above-mentioned new features, we improved the interface, fixed some bugs, and generally made the plugin more stable and better :)

You can download the latest version of the plugin here: The updated documentation can be accessed via http://www.bibsonomy.org/help/doc/jabref-plugin/index.html. We hope this new release helps you to be more efficient in your personal and shared publication managent - we are as usual always happy about feedback, comments, suggestions!!

Best,
Dominik

Main Server Crashed

2009-10-06T21:10:00.003+02:00

Today we had a crash of our main machine. It took us 1 hour to restart everything as it was late and no one was in the office. This was the reason BibSonomy was not available. Unfortunately this is the third time within 4 weeks that the machine crashed. We are now searching for the reason but currently we have no clue as we did not observe any special situation. It seem to be some strange hardware defect. Lets cross the finger that we can figure out the problem soon.

New Release

2009-09-28T17:06:00.001+02:00

Those of you which have recently tried to delete a post probably have noticed a small but helpful change: a dialog box is now asking you for confirmation. If you accidentally clicked on the "delete" link, you have now the chance to stop the process. If you don't like this feature: just disable it on the settings page and you get back the old behaviour.

This is just one of the changes the new release contains but obviously the most noticeable one. Furthermore, we updated the code to import bookmarks from Delicious and Firefox, to upload JabRef layouts and to pick/unpick posts for the basket. Several smaller bugfixes also made it into the release.

As always a small sidenote: although we tested the code, it might contain bugs we did not find. So if you think you've found an error, don't hesitate to contact us!

Tagging for Championship

2009-09-08T15:21:00.013+02:00

As a social bookmarking system, assigning tags to resources is one of BibSonomy's most important and frequent processes. Since a while, the user is assisted by a set of recommended tags as shown in Figure 1.

The Challenge

Recommender systems are subject to active research and different approaches emerged. In the context of this year's ECML PKDD Discovery Challenge, BibSonomy's tag recommendations were provided by 14 different recommender systems from 10 different research teams in 7 different countries during the last five weeks. The challenge consisted of three tasks where the first two tasks were dealing with fixed datasets obtained from BibSonomy, while the third task's subject was to provide tag recommendations to the user in the running system.

Yesterday, during the ECML PKDD Discovery Challenge Workshop, the challenge's participants presented their recommender systems and discussed the different approaches, still ignorant of the third task's winning team, which finally was announced in the evening during the conference's opening session.

Rating the Systems

Algorithms for tag recommendations are typically evaluated by computing some performance measure in an "off-line" setting, that is, by iterating over posts in a dataset, which was derived from a social bookmarking system, presenting only a user and a resource to the recommender system. Thus, for each post, the set of suggested tags can be compared with those the user had assigned. Participants in Task 1 and Task 2 were evaluated in such a setting.

But these "off-line" settings not only ignore some constraints in real live applications (e.g. cpu usage and memory consumption), they also can't take into account the effect of presenting a set of recommended tags to the user. To evaluate these effects, we set up Task 3, were recommender systems were integrated into BibSonomy and the recommender systems had to deliver their tag recommendations within a timeout of 1000 ms.

For evaluating the different recommender systems (in the off-line settings as well as Task 3), we calculated precision and recall for each system. While precision measures, how many recommended tags where adequate, recall takes into account, how many of the tags the user actually assigned to the resource where recommended.

Figure 2 shows the final results of the on-line challenge (which is available here). For each recommender system, we calculated precision and recall, considering only the first n tags (for n=1,2,..., 5) and averaged over all posts. The top blue graph for example shows, that from the corresponding recommender system's five recommended tags (the very right point) around 18% were chosen by the user (precision 0.18) and around 23% of the tags which the user finally assigned to the resource were "predicted" by the recommender.

The winning teams are:

Task 1: Marek Lipczak, Yeming Hu, Yael Kollet, and Evangelos Milios (Paper)
Task 2: Steffen Rendle and Lars Schmidt-Thieme (Paper)
Task 3: Marek Lipczak, Yeming Hu, Yael Kollet, and Evangelos Milios (Paper)

We are happy to say, that it was an interesting challenge which gave substantial insight into the performance of different approaches to the task of tag recommendation. We'd like to thank everybody who contributed to this challenge - last but not least each of BibSonomy's users.

BibSonomy Blog

Release 2.0.21

Best Season's Greetings from the BibSonomy Team!

Feature of the Week: BibSonomy's new Look

[Feature of the Week] BibSonomy Forecast: Partly (tag)cloudy!

New Release (2.0.20)

Short down time today

Feature of the week: Add new publications by ISBN

Feature of the Week: Discussion Statistics Box

Feature of the Week: Introducing BibSonomy Spheres

What are BibSonomy Spheres?

How can a build a sphere and assign users to it?

Accessing your Spheres

Following a Sphere in iGoogle

Why should I use BibSonomy spheres?

Finally

Today's Release (2.0.19)

Feature of the Week: BibSonomy on Twitter

AutoCompletion for Post Publication Details

Feature of the week: person name normalization in "Last, First" form

Why "Last, First"?

Interaction with BibSonomy

What else did change?

Feature of the Week: Discussed Posts

Release 2.0.18

Feature of the week: access your posts in Emacs (with RefTeX)

Find out which posts you want to use from BibSonomy

Add an appropriate \bibliography{} command to your LaTeX file

Write a small shell script

Tell RefTeX about the script

Try it!

Further reading

Improvements

(Classic) Feature of the Week: Attaching documents to publication posts

(Classic) Feature of the week: Posting Publications as snippet

(Classic) Feature of the week: Posting Publications

Feature of the Week: Updated mobile interface

Feature of the week: Supported Filetypes

Feature of the Week: The Hidden Tag

Release 2.0.17

Sort your Bookmark Lists

A note on problems with Google-based OpenID logins

Feature of the Week: Reviews and Discussion

Release 2.0.16

The structure of author/editor names in publications

What happened to some posts in our blog?

Feature of the week: a quick look into 2010

Posting Publications

Full Text Search

Curriculum Vitae (CV)

Major Release with improved performance and new features

Feature of the week: TagCloud

Feature of the Week: Next steps in BibSonomy

Feature of the week: Localized Date Information

Feature of the Week: Posting to BibSonomy by Gesture with Android & Dolphin Browser

BibSonomy's Downtime, Finally!

BibSonomy's Downtime - Update

BibSonomy's Downtime, 15.6.2011

Feature of the Week: Sort your Post Lists

Release 2.0.15

Feature of the Week: Improved Content-Negotiation Capabilities

Feature of the Week: Delicious Importer

Feature of the week: BibSonomy mobile

Bugfix version of BibSonomy JabRef Plugin (2.5.2) available

Release 2.0.14

Feature of the Week: Use the RSS/Copy Link

Feature of the Week: Optimize your Firefox Browser for BibSonomy

First try: Speed up fulltext search

Next steps: Add more keywords

Finally: Quickly access your own posts

Feature of the Week: Hidden System Tags

Feature of the Week: Password Buddies

Release 2.0.13

Feature of the Week: API outputs JSON instead of XML

Feature of the Week: Order parameter for API tag requests

Feature of the Week: DOI Integration

Feature of the Week: File-Upload

Release 2.0.12

Feature of the week: authentication

Remember Me

Add an appropriate `\bibliography{}` command to your LaTeX file