Today's release 2.0.5

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.

Feature of the week: Relations

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

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

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.