Feature of the week: 2009 in review

2009 brought many improvements and new features for BibSonomy but also interesting research activities. We briefly review this year before next week's post gives an outlook on 2010.

Tag Recommendations

As part of the ECML PKDD 2009 conference we organized the Discovery Challenge, where the participants could test their tag recommendation methods on a BibSonomy dataset. A particularly interesting part of the challenge was the online evaluation which allowed the researchers to evaluate their approaches in the running system and actually show their recommendations to our users. The underlying infrastructure was provided by our new tag recommendation framework which proved to be very useful. It allowed us to distribute the tag recommendation work over several machines located all over the world. E.g., the winner's recommender was running in Canada.

Research Projects

Two new projects centered around BibSonomy started this year: PUMA, which will improve academic publication management in cooperation with the University Library Kassel, and Info 2.0 (in German), which investigates chances and risks of the Web 2.0 with respect to informational self-determination in cooperation with the Institute for Public Law.

Plugins

We released three new plugins which better integrate BibSonomy with other tools. The JabRef plugin allows you to synchronize your publication references with the bibliography manager JabRef and the Typo3 extension integrates publication lists from BibSonomy into the content management system Typo3. Just released two weeks ago and ready for testing is the new Firefox add-on which better integrates BibSonomy into the Firefox web browser. We will introduce this add-on in one of the next FOTWs.

Personalization

You now see similar users in your sidebar on which you can click to surf their posts in a personalized ranking. Furthermore, you can follow users you find interesting to stay tuned on what they post.

Dumps of the Dataset

Since quite some time we offer a dataset of the BibSonomy database in form of an SQL dump for research purposes to interested people. A web page now describes the available dumps and how to get one. Newly, the dumps also contain the users' tag relations.

Development

In an ongoing effort to open the BibSonomy source code to the public, we released some of the core modules in a public Maven repository. E.g., now you have access to our screen scrapers, which allow you to extract publication metadata from more than 60 digital libraries. Most modules have a GPL or LGPL license.

Next week we will present our current activities and discuss the plans for 2010.

Feature of the week: maven repository

First, to all of our users a happy new year 2009!

This year will bring us new projects centered around BibSonomy and we hope to make the system much more useable. Today we're opening a part of the BibSonomy source code, so it's a post for all developers interested in BibSonomy.

A public maven repository is available on dev.bibsonomy.org - our new developer page. Currently, the following modules are available:

• bibsonomy-model
  The classes defining the data structures BibSonomy is working on. In particular, all objects one operates on using the REST client API are defined by those classes.
• bibsonomy-common
  Most enums, exceptions, and utility functions are contained in this module.
• bibsonomy-rest-common
  Common things needed by both the REST server and the REST client, in particular enums, exceptions, and the XML renderer.
• bibsonomy-rest-client
  The REST client API. Everybody who's programming Java and wants to use BibSonomy's API should have a look at this module.
• bibsonomy-bibtex-parser
  The thing which parses every incoming publication reference. Really an important part of the system. It's based on javabib from Johannes Henkel. Kudos to Johannes!
• bibsonomy-scraper
  Here they are: all the scrapers which allow us to import publication references from more than 60 digital libraries.
• bibsonomy-scrapingservice
  The stand alone scraping service.

All code is released under GPL or even LGPL licenses. We will soon provide updates on a regular basis. For bug reports we suggest to use the issue tracker at our collaborative development environment.

We would be very pleased to get some feedback and hope to stimulate some further external development around BibSonomy. Have fun playing around with the code and let us know what you've done with it.