Recent Changes

Today we want to announce some minor changes we included in BibSonomy in the last few weeks and which might be interesting to our users.

First, tags belonging exclusively to non-public posts are now not in a users tag cloud any longer. Of course, this does not hold for your own tag cloud where you can still see all tags.

Second, a list of screen scrapers which are available is now accessible on /scraperinfo. The scrapers support the import of publication references from web sites with well known structure like ACM or Springer. Additionally we added a scraper which (with the help of an information extraction technique) also allows to import single references which are in a format readable for humans. Just select an entry and press the "postPublication" button in your Browser (which you can get here).

Third, we updated the scraper interface - the new version is now available: org.bibsonomy.scraper_0.2.jar.

As always we're curently working on more features to make BibSonomy more usable and we will announce them here, soon.

Scrapers now included

The update we released today includes scrapers for the ACM Digital Library and Citeseer. More Scrapers will follow and smaller ones are already included. If you have suggestions for scrapers or already implementations (see last post) we would be pleased to know so.

Additionally we improved the tag editing through the edit link which now appears on every page which shows bookmarks or publications. Since it now also appears on pages which contain resources not owned by you (and therefore you're of course not allowed to change their tags), the page for tag editing shows only the resources which you own. A nice drawback is that now also the download page has an edit link.

Scraper Interface Available

At the moment it is possible to select a BibTeX entry on a web page and via pressing the postPublication button inserting it into BibSonomy. The next feature we will release next week allows to extract references from ACM or Citeseer without selecting a BibTeX entry. What we can already provide today is an interface for Scrapers and some helper classes which allow you to implement scrapers for other services. If you are interested in developing a BibSonomy-compliant scraper which we can include into the project, have a look into this JAR-file which contains the source code for the needed classes: scraper-0.1.jar.

New Features of BibSonomy

This week we updated BibSonomy and introduced a lot of new features. We will briefly explain them here:

OpenURL support

For every publication entry you can now query your local library (if it supports it) via OpenURL. To activate it, just add the URL of your local OpenURL resolver on the settings page to your account information.

Tag Editor

The edit tags page offers a tag editor with which you can change the tags of several posts at once. Every post which contains all the tags you entered will be altered by replacing these tags with the new tags you specified.
Let us further explain this with an example: If you enter folksonomy project in the first box ("tags to replace") and social bookmarking system in the second box ("new tags"), all resources which have both folksonomy and project as tags will be altered by removing these two tags and adding the tags social, bookmarking and system.
Of course, you can use this editor to just change one tag to another (for example systems to system to clean your vocabulary). Then this single tag will be replaced by the new tag. This way you can also change your relations, but more on this later.

OWL output of publications entries

The output of publication entries in OWL format using the SWRC ontology is now possible. SWRC is an ontology based on XML/RDF/OWL for storing and describing data relevant for researchers (like publications or conferences).

Relations or "Concepts"

The most important new feature in BibSonomy are relations between tags. Basically you can now connect two tags A and B by a relation which says that A is a subtag of B and thus B a supertag of A. To get a glimpse which relations might be useful have a look on the relations page for existing relations.
First, there are two ways to insert such relations: during tagging a resource you can say that volleyball is some kind of sport by adding the tag volleyball->sport (or sport<-volleyball). The tag parser then adds the relation (volleyball is a subtag of sport) to your relation database and also adds the tags volleyball and sport to the resource.
Second you can use the relation editor on the edit tags page to add/remove relations to/from the system. Usage should be straightforward: just enter one or more subtags in the left box and the supertag in the right box.
Now that you have some relations, you see them in your tag cloud with a little arrow in front of them. By clicking on the arrow you can add/remove relations to your relation list above the tag cloud. This list allows you to reach relations without searching for them in the tag cloud.
If you click on a supertag of a relation (for example sport) you'll see a page which shows all resources, which have either sport as tag or one of its subtags (maybe volleyball or basketball).

And finally ...

We're aware of the fact that some of the new features might be difficult to understand or use in the beginning. Therefore we work on improvements on these new features, especially in usability. If you have suggestions or questions don't hesitate to contact us or to comment here.

Gnome Deskbar Integration

We now have some code to integrate BibSonomy into the Gnome Deskbar!

Thanks to Jörn Dreyer who provided a Gnome Deskbar handler for BibSonomy, licensed under the GPL 2.

Terms of Use and Privacy Statement Online

The Terms of Use and the Privacy Statement for using BibSonomy can be viewed at:

http://www.bibsonomy.org/termsofuse.jsp

Keyboard Shortcut for BibSonomy Posting in Firefox

Here's how to make Firefox post your current page at the push of a button:

1. Install the KeyConfig extension


2. Bind the following code to a key of your choosing, replacing MYUSERNAME with your user name:
   
gBrowser.loadURI("javascript:location.href=
'http://www.bibsonomy.org/ShowBookmarkEntry?c=b&jump=yes
&user=MYUSERNAME&url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'
&description='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+'
&extended='+encodeURIComponent(window.getSelection())")

   Make sure to keep it all on one line.
   

Collect BibTeX entries from LaTeX aux file from BibSonomy

Here's a little script that collects all the BibTeX entries referenced in a particular LaTeX file. Usage is:

grabbib.pl [username] [LaTeX aux file name] > bibtexfile.bib

EndNote Export

We have set up a first version of an EndNote export filter which you can access by putting /endnote in the URL, i.e. for /tag/web you get the EndNote output on /endnote/tag/web. There is also an EndNote button in the footer of pages which support EndNote export.

Note that since we're more into BibTeX we have little experience with EndNote and therefore we used the EndNote User's Guide (pages 172-175) to relate BibTeX fields to EndNote fields. There were several BibTeX fields for which we did not find a corresponding EndNote field. In the following tables you can see the mapping. If you have suggestions to improve EndNote output, let us know.

EndNote Tag	EndNote Field Name	BibTeX Field Name
%A	Author	author
%B	Secondary Title	booktitle
%C	Place Published	address
%D	Year	year
%E	Editor	editor
%F	Label
%G	Language
%H	Translated Author
%I	Publisher	publisher
%J	Journal	journal
%K	Keywords	keywords
%L	Call Number
%M	Accession Number
%N	Number	number
%P	Pages	pages
%Q	Translated Title
%R	Electronic Resource Number
%S	Tertiary Title
%T	Title	title
%U	URL	url
%V	Volume	volume
%W	Database Provider
%X	Abstract	abstract
%Y	Tertiary Author
%Z	Notes	annote
%0	Reference Type	BibTeX Entry Type
%1	Custom 1
%2	Custom 2
%3	Custom 3
%4	Custom 4
%6	Number of Volumes
%7	Edition	edition
%8	Date
%9	Type of Work
%?	Subsidiary Author
%@	ISBN/ISSN
%!	Short Title
%#	Custom 5
%$	Custom 6
%]	Custom 7
%&	Section	chapter
%(	Original Publication
%)	Reprint Edition
%*	Reviewed Item
%+	Author Address
%^	Caption
%>	Link to PDF
%<	Research Notes
%[	Access Date
%=	Last Modified Date
%~	Name of Database
		crossref
		howpublished
		institution
		key
		month
		note
		organization
		school
		series
		type

BibTeX Entry Type	EndNote Entry Type
article	Journal Article
book	Book
booklet	Book
inbook	Book Section
incollection	Book Section
inproceedings	Conference Paper
manual	Generic
mastersthesis	Thesis
misc	Generic
phdthesis	Thesis
proceedings	Conference Proceedings
techreport	Report
unpublished	Unpublished Work

Changes 2006-03-20

Today we added some more functionality for groups. On the group page you can now see all users which are in the group. This behaviour can be controlled by the group admin on the settings page. Furthermore the group admin can now remove users from a group -- all posts of the removed user which were viewable for the group members become automatically "private". So nothings gets lost. We also enhanced prev/next navigation and added a counter to the search page.

Changes 2006-03-09

Our update today has introduced some nice new features: better handling of friends functionality and a possibility to change the tags of several bookmarks or BibTeX entries in a batch.

On the page /friends you see all posts which are set "viewable for friends" of users which declared you as their friend. Furthermore you see all your friends, can add ore remove them and you see users which declared you as their friend. More on this is written on the help page. Don't hesitate to ask, if you have questions on this.

Thanks to the suggestion of one of our users we have added an easy way to edit tags of several posts at once. Just click on the "edit" link between the "next" and "previous" links on your myBibSonomy page. Then you can edit all tags of the posts (bookmarks or publications) you've seen on the page. As this also works for your tag pages, you can now complete all your imported BibTeX entries which still have the tag "imported".

Ideas for New Features

Thanks to Wouter's and the other new users' input, we've discussed a couple of possible new features today...

BibTeX Snowball Effect

It would be cool if I could be presented with other people's
input for BibTeX fields I left out. E.g. "Would you like to copy the info that "someuser" has said that article "xyz" appeared on pages "127-139"? Of course this would have to be presented in a less verbose fashion at the click of a button, e.g. as a list when posting, or between fields in the BibTeX edit form.

Information Extraction for References

One really wants to have something that can translate something like

Douglas Adams. "The Salmon of Doubt". Reprint Edition. Ballantine Books, 2003.

and all the variants thereof into a proper BibTex entry.

PDF Information Extraction

The next level of coolness would be to do the
above directly from the references in a PDF file.

Changes on 2006-03-07

Today we launched a larger update which includes some fundamental changes. The first one is this blog, which we opened for announcing updates and other BibSonomy related infos.

The most fundamental change is probably the generation of the hashes for publications. There are now two hashes available: a more strict one which includes entry type, title, author, editor, journal, booktitle, key and year and a broader hash which includes only title, author, editor and year in a normalized fashion. This is also described in the FAQ.

Furthermore we tweaked the layout a bit and added some hints to input boxes, which show, for example, which fields are mandatory.

Besides whitespace and the plus sign (which is converted to * automatically), every character is allowed to be contained in a tag. Especially the minus sign is allowed now.

The next improvement we are working on is a tag recommender together with enhanced tag editing functionality.

BibSonomy now has a Blog

BibSonomy is a system for sharing bookmarks and lists of literature. It now has a new blog.

When discovering a bookmark or a publication on the web, you can store it on BibSonomy. You can add tags to your entry to retrieve it more easily. This is very similar to the bookmarks/favorites that you store within your browser. The advantage of BibSonomy is that you can access your data from whereever you are. Furthermore, you can discover more bookmarks and publications from your friends and other people.

Why don't you just try it yourself? Any feedback is very welcome.

Changes on 2006-02-23

Output of BibTeX now includes tags in a field called "keywords", which is more common than "tags".

If you post a single BibTeX snippet, which you already have, you can see the duplicate on the edit bibtex page.

Furthermore the postBookmark button has been updated: selected text from the page is now automatically included in the description/comment field.

On the settings page you can now update your email address, as well as your homepage and real name.

Changes on 2006-02-17

Improved group functionality added: now it is possible to get an aggregated view on the group members content via /group/* pages. Additionally, the tag filter is now case insensitive and you can jump to the page for the first filtered tag by just pressing return; broken bibtex URLs are now repaired on the fly and not in the database.

Changes on 2006-02-10

Fixed a bug in BibTeX import by which one incomplete entry stopped whole import. Also added search for tag or user to main page.

Changes on 2006-02-09

Added a scope to our search field. Now it is possible to search only within the entries of one user by adding user:USERNAME to the search string.