Feature of the week: New help pages

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

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

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!