Feature of the Week: Author Search

One of the recently released new features is the author search. The author search is implemented based on the MySQL full text search feature of the myisam database engine. What we are doing is that we copy all the author information of a publication into a text field of a myisam table. Based on that we are able to request author names as words. This is a very fast and simple way to implement this feature.

The simplest way to search for an author is to try to search for the last name like Knuth. That's what we support right now and what we call a author page. What you get then is a list with all publications and a tag cloud of the author describing the topics of the author based on the tagged publication of our users. Every publication item contains now a link on the last name of every author linking its author page.

An additional restriction of the author search is possible by adding an additional author like  Janson or a tag restriction, see http://www.bibsonomy.org/author/Knuth/MMIX.

Currently we do not support a restriction by the first name of an author. An author name disambiguation is also not possible as we do not have a separate author table where we could store the same name for different author. We are planing to extend the current author search in those directions by a more advance version in the near future.

Have fun
  Andreas

Feature of the Week: Integration of data from the DBLP server

The Digital Bibliography & Library Project (DBLP) is a collection of scientific publications in the field of computer science. DBLP supports listing more than 900,000 articles and is online available on http://dblp.uni-trier.de/. To ease the access of DBLP entries via BibSonomy, we imported about 700,000 references from the DBLP server. The publications are accessible via using the tag 'dblp' (http://www.bibsonomy.org/tag/dblp). In additon, an overview about the DBLP content is available on http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/dblp. After collecting DBLP entries, the user can export the collection in different formats like Endnote, RDF, RTF, BibTex, XML, HTML and RSS.

Have fun, Miranda

Feature of the Week: New Features!

This week we released a new version of BibSonomy which included a bunch of new features. We will present them in more detail in the next weeks but will use this weeks Feature of the Week to introduce the latest improvements:

• Author search: you can now show publications which contain a certain author or editor.
  


• New setting for the tag cloud: minimal frequency of a tag to appear.


• The settings for the tag cloud are now persistent when you switch your browser or computer.


• Several JavaScript improvements. In particular, when editing a publication all non-required fields (as regarded by BibTeX) are now hidden.


• Simplified deletion of posts.


• A bunch of new scrapers.

Feature of the Week: Tagging Tags

As you may know, BibSonomy supports the use of relations between tags. Thus, you can structure your tags, e.g. by stating that every resource tagged with "java" should also be considered to be related to "programming". To do this, you'd tag one resource with "java->programming" or insert that relation explicitly on the "edit tags" page.

There's one more way to insert relations: say you're looking at your "java" page and you think, gee, this is all "programming" stuff. So you decide to tag your own "java" page with "programming".

If you do that, you're inserting a relation between "java" and "programming" into your part of BibSonomy. Notice the drop down box under the tag line in the posting dialog. There you can choose which direction the relation should be: "java->programming" (everything "java" is also about "programming"), or the other way around (which doesn't make sense in this example).

This works for global tag pages such as http://www.bibsonomy.org/tag/java as well for your own tag pages, e.g. http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/schmitz/java.

Remember, you can make use of relations not only to structure your content, but also to find all resources e.g. tagged with "java", even when querying the tag "programming" as a concept.

Happy tagging,
Christoph