Feature of the Week: Python Client for the BibSonomy REST-API

This week's feature touches several activities that are currently happening:

1. We are moving our development infrastructure to Bitbucket.
2. We are reanimating the Python client for the REST API.
3. We are developing a CKAN extension.

These activities are somehow related, at least I am bound to mention them all three in this post.

Moving to Bitbucket

As an important step to further open BibSonomy for other developers and ease the development of applications that use the BibSonomy infrastructure, we are migrating to Bitbucket until the next release (which is planned for end of January). At the moment, several extensions and plugins for PHP, Typo3, Android, etc. are moved to the new Bitbucket BibSonomy account.  Other code will follow during the next weeks, in particular the releases currently available at dev.bibsonomy.org.

Python Client

The old Python client for the BibSonomy REST API was no longer maintained and was not really used (and thus not tested) by a real use-case. Since we now have the need for a Python client (see next section), we started the development of a new client.

As a first use-case to test the code and implement some nice functionality, we wrote the small script onefile.py which allows you to download all your posts from BibSonomy into one HTML file which you can use in offline-mode. This is handy for situations where you don't have an internet connection, in particular, since the script allows you to also download all your documents! The documentation which you can access with --help shows you what is possible:

usage: onefile.py [-h] [-u USER] [-t TAG [TAG ...]] [-d]

                  [--bookmark-file BFILE] [--publication-file BFILE]

                  [--css-file CSSFILE] [--no-bookmarks] [--no-publications]

                  [--test]

                  user apikey

Download posts from BibSonomy and store them in a file.

positional arguments:

  user                  BibSonomy user name

  apikey                corresponding API key (get it from

                        http://www.bibsonomy.org/settings?selTab=1)

optional arguments:

  -h, --help            show this help message and exit

  -u USER, --user USER  return posts for USER instead of user

  -t TAG [TAG ...], --tags TAG [TAG ...]

                        return posts that contain the given tags

  -d, --documents       download documents for publications

  --bookmark-file BFILE

                        file name for bookmarks

  --publication-file BFILE

                        file name for publications

  --css-file CSSFILE    write CSS to file

  --no-bookmarks        do not write bookmarks

  --no-publications     do not write publications

  --test                use test data

We are currently very active in improving the script, therefore feedback and suggestions are highly welcome.

CKAN Extension

CKAN is a web-based platform for scientists to manage and publish dataset metadata as Linked Open Data. To better connect datasets with the publications that describe and use them, we are currently implementing a CKAN extension that allows users to connect their datasets with the corresponding publications from BibSonomy. A mockup screenshot shows how we intend to integrate publications into CKAN:

We think that these are good news for all developers, since rapid development of BibSonomy-based applications with Python is now becoming much easier. Feedback and contributions are welcome - the source code is open and free for everybody.

Happy developing!

Release 2.0.40

Dear BibSonomy users,

today, we released version 2.0.40 of BibSonomy. This release includes the following features:

• OpenID users can now have a password sent to them. This converts the OpenID account to a normal account and you can now log in with your username and a password. The OpenID login for this user is then disabled.
• You can now upload SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) documents.
• We added a new custom tag to the CV page: You can now include your homepage separately.
• Many internal changes like issues with the visibility of the profile picture of a user

Happy tagging!

Thomas

Excluding tags with wildcards

Hello our dear BibSonomy fans,

in our post about the last Release, we mentioned better capabilities of  excluding tags in your searches with wildcard support. Here is an example of what that means and how you can use it:

Let's say you use tags like 'news_2013_09', 'news_2013_10', etc. for tagging news articles of certain months. Furthermore you add tags for the news content like for example 'insurance'. That topic might have occurred frequently in the news.
Furthermore you searched for a certain insurance, so you tagged websites and articles about insurances also with the tag 'insurance'.
Now, if you liked to search for your insurance inquiry, you would also get all the results in the news.

For a longer time, BibSonomy already supports excluding a single tag like 'news' by writing 'sys:not:news' your search query. However, that would be of no help for you in this case, because the tags include the month suffix.

With BibSonomy's new wildcard exclusion feature you can now write 'sys:not:news*' to exclude all the news related posts from your search.


Enjoy the new feature and happy tagging,
Jens

Customize your CV page!

Hello, dear users of BibSonomy,

in release 2.0.39, we changed the way BibSonomy's CV page (see http://www.bibsonomy.org/cv/user/<your username>) works. Before this release, we offered a static web page with information taken from your user profile. The look and feel was predefined and could not be changed (see figure 1).

Figure 1: The old CV look and feel

With the advent of BibSonomy 2.0.39, it is now possible to customize the design of your CV page. We offer a set of exemplary layouts from which you can choose one to instantly prep up the way you're presenting yourself on BibSonomy. If you are a more advanced user, you can also lay a hand on the design itself by creating your own CV page. In the following, we will give you a short overview about the two ways to adapt your CV page to your personal needs.

Choosing a predefined layout

If you are fine with one of our standard layouts, you can easily choose and save one to have it presented on your CV page.

Figure 2: The settings page for your BibSonomy CV. The gray part contains all the tools to edit your CV. You can preview your changes directly below.

For this, direct your browser to the CV settings in BibSonomy. As depicted in figure 2, you see a short help notice at the top and the editing area as a gray part below with a dropdown menu, where you can choose a design template (see figure 3). Below the gray window, you see a preview of your CV, i.e. what it would look like to the public if you saved your changes. Changing the layout will automatically render a new preview.

Figure 3: Choose a standard template according to your likes.

If you found a template you like, you can save it as your default CV layout by clicking on the save-button on the top right.

Creating your own layout

If you're keen on changing a bit more than only tiny bits of your CV, you can choose the option to edit the current layout or maybe even create a new, customized one by clicking on the "edit layout" button (see figure 4 for this).

Figure 4: The open layout editor

In this layout editor, you may change every bit you like about your CV. The only thing you'd need some experience with is the Wiki Markup Language (all the things on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Cheatsheet work fine). We also offer a range of custom XHTML tags. You can find the list of supported tags in the BibSonomy help. These tags make it easier for you to reuse often needed information you already defined in your user settings page on http://www.bibsonomy.org/help_en/CVWiki.
After you entered your changes, you can either preview your CV by clicking on the corresponding buttons in the bottom right corner or you can save it directly by using the "save" button in the top right corner of the editing area.

If everything is OK, you can then view your shiny new CV on http://www.bibsonomy.org/cv/user/<your username here>. We also offer the same functions for group accounts.

We hope you can make good use of that feature. Over time, we plan to add some treats like extra tags or some help buttons to easily insert frequently used code parts to make the use of the editor more comfortable. New layouts are also on our wishlist.

Happy editing (and tagging) :)
Thomas

PUMA in use in Frankfurt

Since the beginning of October a new PUMA instance is in use at the library of the University of Frankfurt.
PUMA is a clone of BibSonomy meant for local installations of universities, libraries or research institutes. Like BibSonomy, it allows to collect and share bookmarks and publications but has additional features like a guided export to an institutional repository (read more about PUMA).
As part of the introduction of the HeBIS Discovery Service (HDS) for Hessian university libraries, a customized version of VuFind Discovery System was developed which includes an interface to PUMA. A few months before, Kassel's version of the HDS has been coupled with PUMA.

The original favorites list by VuFind was replaced by a PUMA managed list. This offers many additional features for VuFind users, like new export and citation formats, as well as tagging. Now it’s possible to export literature research in a large variety of formats (BibTeX, EndNote, Harvard, Chicago, etc.) In addition, the entries do not have to be grouped as several favorite lists, but can be organized more clearly by the free assignment of tags. With the appendant tag cloud, entries can be filtered by topic. PUMA users also have the huge advantage that publications stored in VuFind are immediately available in PUMA and can thus be directly accessed and exported from PUMA.

With the new PUMA instance, HDS users in Frankfurt also take advantage of these features. As part of the launch of the HeBIS Discovery Service, more PUMA installations will follow for the universities of Mainz, Marburg, Gießen and Darmstadt.

BibSonomy Release 2.0.39

This is the first blog post since some time - sorry for the delay. We will definitely continue our "feature of the week" series. Today, however, we are proud to announce the latest version of BibSonomy which was released yesterday. BibSonomy 2.0.39 contains the following new bug fixes and features:

• a new scraper for First Monday
• the REST client now supports the creation of concepts and the renaming of documents
• the CSL output of the REST API was repaired
• a new recommendation framework is integrated that allows other researchers to integrate their recommender algorithms more easily
• plus several smaller internal improvements

The next release is scheduled for end of November.

Happy Tagging!

Conferator goes INFORMATIK 2013

Almost three years ago we presented the first version of Conferator, when we hosted LWA 2010 in Kassel.
Conferator is built on top of the RFID-based proximity sensing hardware developed by the SocioPatterns collaboration. This technology enables the collection of face-to-face contacts, which can be recalled later. Based on this information, for example, Conferator provides recommendations concerning interesting contacts. In addition, Conferator became a Ubicon application utilizing the Ubicon software platform.

During the last three years the system has been available at several conferences and events, for example, at LWA 2011, LWA 2012, and at ACM Hypertext 2011.
This year we are proud to make the system available at the INFORMATIK 2013 in Koblenz, for the partner conferences KI, MATES, eGov, ePart and Virtual Goods & ODRL.
We expect about up to 350 participants for whom the system will be available.

All these years, the Ubicon team of the Knowledge and Data Engineering group further developed the system to provide a better conferencing experience.
In the current version 2.5, which we specifically designed for INFORMATIK 2013, we concentrated on social network analysis features, data mining components, and performance optimizations.

Let us describe the key features of Conferator and invite you to use the system during INFORMATIK 2013:

• Schedule: The schedule page enables a personalized view on the conference program.

• Overview: The overview page provides a timeline of the Conferator interactions - including, for example, current tweets and BibSonomy posts.

• Map: The map shows the conference locations and other participants.

• My Contacts: The contacts page shows your own contacts throughout the conference.

• People: On the people page, you can browse the list of Conferator participants of the conference, of your friends, persons who want to talk to you and your community members.

• Recommender: Based on face-to-face contacts and talk information, Conferator features an interactive recommender for both participants and talks.

Happy conferencing & networking!
Conferator-Team

Maintenance

Today we will update our system. Over the day short downtimes are to be expected. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Release 2.0.38

Dear BibSonomy users,

we're happy to announce the release of BibSonomy 2.0.38. The following new features are included:

• we improved document sharing across groups. You can now control in detail to which specific groups you share your uploaded documents
• Quite a time ago, we shared some thoughts about implementing semantic pingback in BibSonomy, so that authors will be notified if their publications were cited elsewhere. This feature has now arrived.
• We included wildcard matching for the sys:not system tag, to help you exclude tags even better in your searches
• Your CV page is now customizable.

Next to all this, we also fixed some internal bugs.

The next release of BibSonomy will be on Octobre, 16th this year because of our summer break.

Happy tagging :)

Thomas

Feature of the week: Importing bookmarks from your web browser

BibSonomy had a bookmark importer for Mozilla Firefox which with the last release was extended such that it is now possible to import your bookmarks from Google Chrome, Safari and Opera in addition to Firefox.  

Here are simple steps how to import your bookmarks to BibSonomy

1. Export your bookmarks from one of the following browsers:Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, or Opera.
2. Sign in to BibSonomy.
3. On the settings page under “import your bookmarks from your browser” select your exported bookmark file. Then click on import.
    
4. Your bookmarks will be added, if they are not already in your bookmark collection.
5. You can now edit the tags of your posts by selecting “edit the tags of this post”:
6. Add your tags and then press the edit button.

Done!

Happy Tagging!

Haile

BibSonomy is back

Hello folks,

BibSonomy is up again, so: Happy Tagging

Jens

Downtime due to server failure

Dear BibSonomy user, unfortunately our main BibSonomy server had to be restarted. In order to thoroughly investigate the reason for this failure, BibSonomy is down for a period up to two hours. We are very sorry for this inconvenience! Take a rest and then keep on tagging!

Release 2.0.37

Hello BibSonomy Folks,

today, we released version 2.0.37 of BibSonomy. This version comes with the following new features:

• When tag-autocompletion recommends one of the tags you already used, you now see how often you already used it before.
• After searching, the resulting post list is ordered by relevance score. If you like, you can still switch back to order-by-date behavior.
• With BibSonomy's bookmark importers you can now import bookmarks from Safari, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Opera.
• We added a fallback-scraper which uses Dublin Core metainformation for pre-filling your publication post form when there is no page-specific scraper available.

We wish lots of fun and productivity with these advancements and, of course ...

Happy tagging!

Jens

Screencasts zur Nutzung von BibSonomy

(today a blog post for our German-speaking users)

Das Praxisbüro im Fachbereich 11 der Universität Bremen, Human- und Gesundheitswissenschaften, bietet zwei Screencasts zur Nutzung von BibSonomy an. In den Videos wird am Beispiel erläutert, wie eine bestehende Link- und Literatursammlung in BibSonomy durchsucht und gefiltert werden kann und wie BibSonomy für die eigene Sammlung von Links und Literatureinträgen hilfreich ist.
Die Videos sind zu finden auf den Seiten des Praxisbüros oder direkt bei YouTube. Unterhalb der YouTube-Videos gibt es eine Inhaltsübersicht mit Sprungmarken. Für hörbehinderte NutzerInnen stehen automatisierte Untertitel bereit.

Die Videos sind im Rahmen der Produktion des Lernmodules "Wege ins Auslandspraktikum" für Studierende entstanden, beauftragt von Beate Heitzhausen vom Praxisbüro, ausgeführt durch den Mediengestalter Fadri Bischoff, Bremen.
Das Praxisbüro im Fachbereich Human- und Gesundheitswissenschaften an der Universität Bremen ist erster Anlaufpunkt für Studierende bei Fragen rund um das Studium und versteht sich darüber hinaus insbesonders als Vermittler zwischen Studium und Arbeitswelt.

Wir danken dem Praxisbüro für die Videos und wünschen viel Spaß beim Taggen!

Given Name Recommendations in Nameling

Today, we'll report on the name search platform Nameling - another system which is run at the KDE research group and which regular readers of our blog are probably already familiar with (Discover Names, 20DC13 - The ECML PKDD Discovery Challenge 2013 on Recommending Given Names ).

Its been a while (more than a year) that Nameling has been running stable without any code updates, but meanwhile we weren't idle and wrote some papers about the task of finding similar names by means of analyzing name relatedness based on data from the social web ([1], [2]) and how these statically derived name similarities actually fit to the users' search activities in the running system ([3]). We also considered the task of personalized name recommendations ([4]) which is also the task of the 15th ECML PKDD Discovery Challenge, organized by members of the KDE research group at the university of Kassel, the Data Mining and Information Retrieval Group at the university of Würzburg and the Institut für Verteilte Systeme - Fachgebiet Wissensbasierte Systeme at the Leibniz Universität Hannover (see also our previous blog post).

Now, we integrate given name recommendations in the running Nameling system (you can already get a glimpse at the new recommendation features by visiting Namelings beta version). Firstly, on the fly name recommendations, based on a user's search profile are shown on almost every query page in Nameling (e.g., look at the sidebar while looking for similar names of the given name "Emma").

Via the navigation buttons below the list of recommended names, you can browse through even more recommdations (arrows), or request other recommended names (recycle).

And this is the clue: For the next two months, these name recommendations are provided by participants of the 20DC13 Online Challenge. That is, every recommendation request is anonymously passed to each recommender system of the 20DC13 participants. For each user in Nameling, a randomly chosen system is selected for actually displaying name recommendations. But whenever a user presses the recycle button, this association is changed.

But you can also explicitly ask Nameling for name recommendations, relative to a list of names you like (e.g., the future parents' given names)

By clicking on the '+' and '-' signs, you can add a name to your name recommendation query or, respectively, permanently ban a name from your result views. Of course, you can still add each name to your personal list of favourite names and explore a names neighbourhood. Additionally we added the feature of automatically determining your current location (by clicking on the 'satellite dish'), which allows to improve your name recommendations based on your geographic background.

There is an ongoing debate in the recommender system community, concerning the online vs. offline evaluation of recommender systems. Nameling's name recommendation back-end is designed for easy integration of new recommender systems, which may even reside on servers of affiliate research groups (e.g. participants of the online challenge). The performance of a recommender system is then evaluated relative to actual user interactions with the displayed names (e.g. by counting the number of names which were added to the list of favourite names). These feedback information is also (anonymously) passed to the included recommender systems, so that these systems can adopt and improve their recommendations accordingly.

If you are working on recommender systems and are interested in testing your system in a live setting, feel free to contact us. You only have to implement a simple Java interface or a simple Python interface. If you manage to set up a running recommender system within the next ten days (until July 22nd), you may even take part in the 20DC13 online recommender challenge.

In any case: Keep on tagging and happy number crunching!

Your 20DC13 Team
Stephan, Andreas, Robert, Folke & Juergen

Feature of the Week: Mobile Registration

Hello fellow BibSonomy users,

some of you frequently use the mobile version of BibSonomy.
And now it is possible to register via a mobile phone. Let me guide you through some simple steps for the purpose of registering with BibSonomy using a mobile phone:

Navigate to the BibSonomy home page. Once it has has been fully loaded open the login tab at the upper right corner.

Follow the link that says "I have not registered yet, but want to do this now." depicted at the screen below:

Next, fill the forms accordingly and finally, become part of BibSonomy by clicking the 'register' button.

Now you've registered with BibSonomy using your mobile phone.

Thank you for reading and as always:
Happy Tagging!

Release 2.0.36

Yesterday we released version 2.0.36 of BibSonomy. The release contained several new features:

• while editing one of your bookmarks or publications the tag autocompletion shows you the origin of the suggested tag. Whether it is a tag you already used to annotate other resources or a tag of the bookmark/publication you are currently copying from another user or a tag recommended by our service.
• added JSON CSL output to the export pages and export controls. The output is compatible with  all CiteProc implementations (PHP, JavaScript, Haskell).
• added a shorturl that directly takes you to your published publications (and bookmarks), just enter http://www.bibsonomy.org/myown and you are redirected to your resources that you have tagged with the myown tag
• improved scrapers (e.g. Mendeley and ACM)

As usual we also fixed some bugs to improve your experience with BibSonomy.

Happy tagging

Daniel

Feature of the Week: Choose the number of publications you want to export

BibSonomy offers many export formats (currently 46 formats, you can find a list of all export formats here) for your stored publications. Sometimes you only want to export the latest 5 or 10 publications and not the whole list. In the past you had to add a parameter to the url manually (e. g. by appending ?items=10) or manipulate the parameter to limit the number of publications. In the last release we have added buttons to our export pages to help you with this task.

On every BibSonomy page that lists publications you can get to the export page of the currently displayed publications by hovering over the options icon that you will find on the top right of the list.

In the appearing menu the link labeled "more" takes you to the export page:

On the export page you can now use the radio buttons (red box) to set the number of publications you want to export (e. g. 10 publications). You can choose between 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 and 1000 publications:

After choosing the number of publications you can select the export format from the drop down list above or the links below.

I hope this new feature makes it easier to export publications from BibSonomy.

Happy exporting and tagging!
Daniel

Feature of the Week: Sorted BibTex fields

Hello BibSonomy folks,

here is a late but great little feature of the last week: Maybe you have already noticed it, maybe (even better) you were just happy to have it without realizing:

When BibSonomy exports your publication posts to BibTeX, it sorts BibTeX fields alphabetically by their name. We found this to be a real time safer when you are looking for specific information in your data.


so long, Happy Tagging!
Jens

Release 2.0.35

Hello our dear BibSonomy folks,

sorry for being somewhat silent last week. We have been very busy working on new BibSonomy integrations (you will hear about them soon). Most of these are still in the development branch. Today we released version 2.0.35 of BibSonomy containing mainly additional stuff that what we finished along the way.

Here is what version 2.0.35 got for you:

• A bunch of fixes and adoptions of our scrapers
• New scrapers for:
• journals of the American Society for Microbiology
• Hindawi journals
• The American Physiological Society publications
• An improved selection of the number of posts to be exported

regards
and of course: Happy tagging!
 Jens

Feature of the Week: Renaming Uploaded Documents

Hello fellow BibSonomy users,

sometimes there is a need to rename a document you've already attached to a post. Previously, this was not possible in a convenient manner.
But now, due to recent work by Lukas, it is.

Now, let's go trough the process of renaming a file.

First, we pick the post that contains the document.

Next, pressing the icon resembling "rename" next to the file name we want to change ...

... opens the input text field where we can enter the new file name.

Thank you for reading and, as always,

Happy Tagging
Michael

Sometimes it is good to have some work done automatically and we would like to assist you. To make your life easier, BibSonomy supports importing BibTeX and EndNote files (you may get these files from Google scholar for example - or maybe you typed them manually while preparing your previous publications).

Just click "upload file" when you want to add a publication:

Choose the file you want to import and click "post" (you are welcome to edit some options to adjust the import):

Afterwards you may edit the publication manually:

But the best part is: you can also upload files with many publications. All imported publications will be marked with the tag "imported", so you can easily find and edit them later:

Hope this feature will help to save some of your time.

Happy tagging!
Mark

Release 2.0.34

The same procedure as every year month. Today we have release version 2.0.34 of BibSonomy. Besides several bug fixes the release contains the ability to rename your uploaded documents.

Happy tagging!
Daniel

Feature of this Week: Document Preview Pictures

As posted quite some time ago, BibSonomy gives you the opportunity to upload one or more documents for your publication posts. Similar to the preview pictures for bookmarks, you can now also see preview pictures of your uploaded documents title page.

Voilà, this is how it looks like:

Often, one has still remembers the layout of the paper. Therefore the preview pictures can be really handy for finding out which of the documents is the one you have in mind when searching in your collection. A the icon is really small, hovering over it shows you a larger preview:

Preview pictures are only visible for people who are allowed to access the document. By default, this is only you.

You might wonder that uploading a new document, you only see a generic pdf document symbol. In that case, please be patient and check back the next day. BibSonomy works hard for you and creates the image overnight.

Happy tagging!

Feature of the week: Add CSL styled publication lists to your TYPO3 webpages

TYPO3 is, along with Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress, among the most popular content management systems worldwide, (although it is most widespread in Europe). Due to its features, scalability and maturity, TYPO3 is used by to build and manage websites of different types and size ranges, from small sites for individuals or nonprofit organizations to multilingual enterprise solutions for large corporations or universities (read more @Wikipedia).

In past we had built an very rudimentary BibSonomy extension for TYPO3, which is not longer supported by TYPO3 v6 and is not further developed by us. But we are proud to present to you the new BibSonomy CSL (ext_bibsonomy_csl) extension, based on TYPO3 Flow.

With our new Extension BibSonomy CSL you can add a list of publications from BibSonomy to your pages. You can style your bibliography with CSL Stylesheets (Citation Style Language). For this you can choose from a set of pre-installed styles, or you can choose a custom style from the web. Additional you have the option to add your BibSonomy tag cloud to your website.

Installation

To install BibSonomy CSL, log into your TYPO3 installation as an administrator and search in the Extension Manager => Import Extensions for ext_bibsonomy_csl and import them.

After import is finished the extension will be shown in the section "Available Extensions". Press the + symbol for installation.

Add publication lists with Frontend Plugin

Now you can create a new page in the usual way. If you create a new content record you find in plugins section two new entries: Bibsonomy Publication List and Bibsonomy Tag Cloud.

Choose Bibsonomy Publications List to add a list of publications. In "General" tab insert a headline for your list.

In tab Plugin you can setup your publication list. You can choose between user, group or viewable to select the content from BibSonomy. Detailed information about the scheme you can find at http://www.bibsonomy.org/help_en/URL%20Scheme%20Semantics.

Ok, let's go through an example: Assume, you wanna publish your own publications in a blog post (and in BibSonomy all own publications are tagged with myown). Choose user as content source type and enter your BibSonomy user name as content type value (in this example we've choosed the user dbenz). Now you have to filter your selection by using the tag myown. For this, enter myown in the input field for tags. If you want to select more than one tag you have to separate them by a space character. Optionally, you can limit the number of publications.

There is also the possibility to filter the content by using freetext search field.  

Warning: Be aware, that you are using your own account to retrieve the posts from BibSonomy. That means, that all posts, that are visible to you in BibSonomy (your private ones too), will be made visible on your oage, if they fit the description in the plugin record. (In our example: all posts you have tagged with myown.)

In the subtab Layout you can choose one of the (pre-)installed citation styles to layout your publication list. If your desired CSL style isn't contained in the default selection, then you can insert a custom style, by entering the XML code of the stylesheet. The Citation Style Language (CSL) is an open XML-based language to describe the formatting of citations and bibliographies. A large list of freely available styles can be found on http://www.zotero.org/styles/.

In the third subtab 'Login' you have to enter your BibSonomy API credentials. For this you need your username and your API key.

Add your BibSonomy Tag Cloud with Frontend Plugin

Choose Bibsonomy Tag Cloud as plugin while creating new record. Typically, a tag cloud will be placed in the sidebar. So you can choose the right or left content area for inserting.

For tag cloud content you can also choose between user, group or viewable to select the content from BibSonomy. Assume you want to add your personal BibSonomy tag cloud choose user as content type and insert your username for content type value. In subtab Login you have to enter again your API credentials.

Manage your CSL styles with the Backend Plugin

Typo3 extensions are divided into Frontend Plugins and Backend Modules. The both frontend plugins Bibsonomy Publication List and Bibsonomy Tag Cloud, I've already presented. To manage your Citation Stylesheets you can use the Backend Module CSL Styles.

By default there are a lot of styles pre-installed. To add your own custom styles, create a new folder 'CSL Styles' in the page tree. Choose CSL Styles in menu sidebar and select the Folder CSL Styles in page tree. An empty page with two buttons will be shown. Click on Create New Style to add a custom style.

There are three ways to add a new Citation Style

1. Direct input: Enter the XML source of your style in the text area and press Save to add the style
2. Import from URL: Enter the URL of an Citation Style file and press Import 
3. Upload CSL file: Select a CSL XML file from your filesystem and press Upload

Now you can take a preview of your new style: Click on Show Styles.

To delete styles click on the paper trash icon, left of the style.

I hope this introduction was helpful. 

Happy tagging,
Sebastian!

Feature of the Week: Sort your Post Lists

Since the last release of BibSonomy 2.0.33 we announced a few changes: one of them is the new feature to sort publications by the BibTeX field number.
In a previous blog entry we introduced the URL parameters sortPage and sortPageOrder. With the use of the URL parameters you can sort your publication lists by different BibTeX fields in an ascending or descending order.
As of now the sortPage parameter is extended by another option number. The number field of a BibTeX file represents the issue number of a journal, magazine or tech-report. Now you can sort the publication lists in BibSonomy by this issue number.
Here is an example in search of "social" with a descending order by the BibTeX fields journal, issue and number:
http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/sdo/social?sortPage=journal|issue|number&sortPageOrder=desc

Happy Tagging !
Nils

Release 2.0.33

today, a new version of BibSonomy has been released. Amongst many internal improvements we are happy to announce the following changes:

• sorting of publication posts by their BibTeX field numbers via url parameter sortPage=number
• new webservice for querying related tags
• JCBScraper
• Improved rest-client-api including more robust charset handling and document uploads

Happy tagging!
Jens

20DC13 - The ECML PKDD Discovery Challenge 2013 on Recommending Given Names

This years ECML PKDD Discovery Challenge is organized by several members of the BibSonomy Team. After the successful challenges on Tag Recommendation in 2008 and 2009 this years challenge focuses on a new domain, that can profit from recommender systems:

All over the world, future parents are facing the task of finding a suitable given name for their children. This choice is influenced by different factors, such as the social context, language, cultural background and especially personal taste. Most books, websites or mobile apps aid parents only by offering alphabetically ordered list of names.


CAN YOU DO BETTER?

In the challenge, participants will explore different recommender strategies and their ability to predict names, that users will find interesting. Hereby, the recommendation of names provides a serious and versatile task, that can be approached from several different perspectives:

• The influence of personal taste, language and geographic user location, for example, presents an opportunity for context-aware recommendations. 
• The influence of the social context of a user brings in the social network analysis community as another source to improve the quality of the recommender with its methods. 
• The etymological roots as well as connotations of names that have arisen over time (e.g., through popular cultural, political or religious bearers of a given name) suggest that methods based on inherent semantics and “content” may also yield successful recommendation approaches. 
• Methods from the field of sentiment analysis may help to distinguish names which are popular because users like those names from those which are popular because users are interested in their context.

For the challenge, participants can make use of a new data set from the name-search engine nameling where thousands of users are looking up names to find similar or related names to name their children.

Results from an online and an offline experiment will be presented during a workshop, that is held in conjunction with this year's

European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases - the premier European machine learning and data mining conference.

More info on the challenge, on the registration, the data set and the workshop can be found on the official Discovery Challenge Website.

The registration is open!

Your 20DC13 Team
Stephan, Andreas, Robert, Folke & Juergen

Release 2.0.32

Dear BibSonomy Users,

today we released version 2.0.32 of BibSonomy. This release includes many internal changes.

External changes are:

• Redirect to your login page if a login error occurred
• the dropdown menu on the top doesn't disappear as easily as before
• A new scraper for the GBV (www.gbv.de)

Happy tagging!

Thomas

Feature of the Week: PUMA II

We are happy to announce that we could attract a followup funding for the very successful PUMA project. PUMA is a clone of BibSonomy, meant for local installations of universities, libraries or research institutes. It allows like BibSonomy to collect and share bookmarks and publications. It has additional features like an guided export to an institutinal repository or an integration into the OPAC system of the library.
As you may already know PUMA builds on top of the BibSonomy technology and most of the developments made within PUMA II will be available as new BibSonomy features. The project started at the beginning of February and will run one year with an option for a second year. For PUMA II, the DMIR from the university of Würzburg group joined the team consisting otherwise of the KDE group and the library the University of Kassel.

One major goal of the project is to establish a community around PUMA. To reach this we aim for other institutions which will host the PUMA system like the library at our university. Further, we will work on a lot of new features. Here a short list which provides an overview:

• community entries for publications with wiki like versioning and audited entries,
• better integration into third party systems like moodle and typo3 (new or improved plugins),
• single sign on and Shibboleth authorization,
• improved frontend and better support pages,
• better open social support,
• the integration of ping back and
• a new concept to improve the functionality for groups.

Beside all these features we are working on a business plan to support other institutions running a PUMA system. Please contact us if you are interested.

In the near future we will report progress of the project and of course all details on the new features.

Happy tagging
Andreas

Feature of the week: Organizing a Research Group's Literature Suggestions

Last week we received an e-mail from a user asking the following question:

For our scientific society we would like to allow its members to make suggestions for literature that should be added to the society's database. The group members could use BibSonomy to add suggestions easily using BibSonomy's browser add-on. This works only if suggestions can be easily added. Is this possible with the browser add-on or does it require an additional step?

Our answer reads as following:
In principle, there are two mechanisms to achieve your goal. Both are triggered by system tags:

1. Members of your group can use the tag for:GROUPNAME to copy a post directly "into" the group, i.e., the copy is afterwards owned by the user that owns/constitutes the group.
2. Members of your group can use the tag send:GROUPNAME to copy a post into the group's inbox. There, the group user can add the post to the group's collection or ignore it (i.e., delete it from the inbox).

Option 1) works only "in the direction" of the group user (i.e., group members can copy posts into the group's collection), option 2) works also between group members and between friends.
Another option would be to just agree upon a specific tag and then all group members annotate relevant posts with that tag. You can access those posts then at http://www.bibsonomy.org/group/GROUPNAME/TAG.

Happy Tagging!

Release 2.0.31

Dear BibSonomy-Community,

today we released BibSonomy 2.0.31!

This release contains new scrapers, namely:

• Econstor
• APA
• BMJOpen
• CDP from Sage
• Pharmacognosy

We also included a new publication renderer as well as a reworked discussion menu.

Internally, we prepared several new features for the next release, which just aren't ready yet :-)

Happy tagging!

Feature of the week: Migrating your bookmarks from Connotea to BibSonomy

Hello, dear Connotea users,

as you may have noticed, Connotea will be shut down at the beginning of March this year (see http://connotea.org/). For those of you who want to keep their bookmarks from Connotea, why not migrate to BibSonomy? In the following, I want to show you how to do it step by step.

In BibSonomy, you also can organise and share your bookmarks. We distinguish between publications (for scientific articles, etc.) and bookmarks (for websites). Publications are usually characterized through metadata like title, author, year, abstract, publisher etc. whereas bookmark posts mainly contain a URL and its title. For both of these kinds of posts, you can assign tags as well as a description.

Another feature of BibSonomy lies in the social organization of users into followers, friends, spheres and groups, each with separate privacy settings, i.e. you can control almost freely who can see your entries, based on post-level!

The best part of it: BibSonomy is completely free! You can sign up right here, right now :-)

Of course you do not have to start from scratch, if you already have a collection of bookmarks. BibSonomy is able to import your bookmarks from Connotea! In the following, we will show you how to do that :-)

1. Export Your Information from Connotea

As soon as you have created an account in BibSonomy, you should log in to Connotea and save your Bookmarks. Do it the following way:

Fig. 1: Use the proper "export list" link!

As depicted in figure 1, click on the button labeled "export list". (Do not yet follow the link to the bookmark exporter provided by Connotea, as this export function only supports HTML and RIS!) You will now see a page like in figure 2:

Fig. 2: Download your bookmarks in BibTeX format.

Connotea provides a handful of formats into which you can export your list. We want to export our list of bookmarks in the BibTeX format for easy integration into BibSonomy in the next step. Your bookmarks will be provided as a *.bib-file for downloading. Remember where you put it :)

2. Importing BibTeX Publications in BibSonomy

After logging in on the BibSonomy website, you have to open the "post publication" dialog. You can find it on the grey bar in the menu "add post" (see figure 3).

Fig. 3: Enter the "post publication" dialog.

When the "post publication" dialog opened, open the tab called "upload file". You have to select the exported BibTeX file from Connotea (I hope you still know where it is :-) ) and then hit "post" to upload it and parse the contained information into BibSonomy.

Fig. 4: Choose a file to upload.

After you've done this, you will notice the parsing results at the bottom of the page, as exemplified in figure 5.

Fig. 5: Parsing results

In our example, we were able to successfully parse two publications. At this point, they will have already been added to your collection, but you can still change the tags.

As you can see in figure 5, the bookmark with a link to "My Google" could not be recognized as a publication, because the BibTeX entry lacked information about authors or a year of publication. Because of this, it has not yet been added to your collection, because our system distinguishes between publications and bookmarks, as we already mentioned above.

After a click on "home" on the left of the grey menu bar you should now be able to see your publications posts :-)

3. Importing Bookmarked Websites from Connotea as BibSonomy Bookmarks

To include your Connotea items purely as bookmarks, you can make use of the Firefox bookmark import function in BibSonomy. Just a small note: This operation is independent from your browser :-)

You first have to download the HTML file exported from Connotea at http://connotea-export.nature.com/exporter. Again, remember where you save the download :-) This HTML file contains a list of links with some information about the posts, which will mostly be ignored, so don't worry much about it.

To import these links as bookmarks in BibSonomy, you have to visit the BibSonomy settings page and then select the tab "imports" and follow the instructions.

After you have uploaded the file successfully, you will be notified about the successful import. After a click on "home", you should be able to see your new bookmarks in the left column.

Hopefully we were able to help you a bit with this blog post! We are happy to welcome you as a new BibSonomy user! Have fun continuing your work and exploring the new features BibSonomy offers to you!

Thomas