Feature of the Week: Introducing BibSonomy Spheres

What are BibSonomy Spheres?

As a social bookmark and publication sharing system, most of BibSonomy's content is user generated and as the number of users using the system is increasing, also the amount of information available increases. Consequently more and more topics of interest come into the system and accordingly the user has to somehow focus on relevant entries. One approach for focussing on relevant resources is to just look at entries of users which are relevant for you. But interests are diverse and accordingly the set of relevant users distributes over the set of interests.

BibSonomy now allows you to arbitrarily group other users according to your topics of interest. You could, e.g. build a group of your co-workers and one of users which you share some interests. Such a group is called "Sphere".

How can a build a sphere and assign users to it?

If you have identified a user as relevant to, e.g., your 'soccer' topic of interest, you can navigate to the users page in BibSonomy (e.g. http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/folke).
on the top of the sidebar (on the right) you see the 'friend' button.


Here you can add or remove the user from some of your spheres but you can also create a new sphere by entering the corresponding name into the input field and pressing 'add' (or the enter key). Note that you can directly navigate to each sphere by clicking on the sphere names.

Accessing your Spheres

You get a brief summary of your spheres if you navigate to http/www.bibsonomy.org/spheres (or by following the 'mySpheres' entry in your personal menu. On this summary page you essentially find each sphere's members as well as the corresponding tag clouds:

But also on the side bar on your profile page or the friends page you find a "sphere cloud" linking to your spheres:


As on any other resource list in BibSonomy, you can also follow a given sphere using a rss-feed (publrss/sphere/).

Following a Sphere in iGoogle

You can finally follow a sphere by adding our brand new iGoogle gadget to your iGoogle Dashboard. Just add our gadget either directly http://www.bibsonomy.org/resources/opensocial/gadgets/bibsonomySpheresGadget.xml or even simpler by following this link (please don't get irritated by the privacy dialog - we don't access any of your private data stored at google. We just store your query parameters).

Why should I use BibSonomy spheres?

Firstly, of course, because it is a cool feature ;-) But we will also to continue to build services upon BibSonomy's Spheres, such as personalized user and tag recommendations, improving search and many more. By using BibSonomy Spheres you also support this development by providing valuable data for training our models.

Finally

BibSonomy Spheres as well as the iGoogle Gadget are in an early development phase. Please excuse any bug you encounter and leave us a short message, so that we can fix it as soon as possible. We are also open to improvements. So, if you happen to have any comments, pleas don't hesitate to email us.

Best Wishes,

Folke Mitzlaff

Feature of the Week: 'Socializer'

Today we released BibSonomy 2.0.9 containing mainly bug fixes and some more visibility for BibSonomy's social features:

• We restructured the navigation links to the inbox, the basket, and the edit tags page. They are now not in one line at the top right corner of the header but in two lines. We are thinking of a larger restructuring of the navigation, but this needs some time.
• We fixed an annoying bug: if you set your profile visible for friends only, you could not see your uploaded photo.
• We added JSON support to our REST-API. This is experimental, not documented, and subject to change. If you want to try it: add an "Accept: application/json" header to your requests (e.g. this query) and you get JSON (in roughly the same format as the XML). Similarly, you can upload JSON using the "Content-Type" header.

The biggest change you will probably notice are the new buttons in the header and in the sidebar. On every user page (i.e., /user/USERNAME) you can now see the user's real name and a link to his or her CV - if both are visible to you. I.e., either the user's profile is public or visible for friends and you are his or her friend. For example, if I visit the page of my colleague Andreas Hotho, I get the following header:

Furthermore, in the sidebar the new socializer allows you to easily add a user as your friend, follow him, or get a personalized view of his posts.

The stars in the friends and follow buttons indicate, if you have added the corresponding user to your friend or follower list. In the example above, the user is my friend but I'm not following him.

As always, parts of the source code are available in our maven repository.

Feel free to test the new features and give us feedback!

Feature of the Week: Groups and Friends

If you have bookmarks and publications, that you want to share with specific people only, you can define them as being your friend (on the friends page). Then you can post selected bookmarks and publications to your friends only. On your friends page, you can see whom you have declared being a friend up to now. You will also see if others have declared you being their friend.

Groups extend this idea of collecting and/or sharing resources. There are two aspects of groups. First a group can be used for aggregating the entries of a specific group. An example is http://www.bibsonomy.org/group/kde/myown which collects all entries that are tagged with "myown" by at least one person of our research group, and which we use for generating our publication page http://www.kde.cs.uni-kassel.de/pub. Second you can restrict access to posts to your group. If you select a group when posting, only members of that particular group will be able to see that content.

The posts still belong to the original user. This means that if the user leaves the group, or cancels her account, the information gets lost for the group. In order to prevent the loss of group knowledge, posts can be automatically copied to one or more groups which the posting user is a member of by attaching the special tag "for:username" to the post. This causes the post to be copied automatically to the respective group, with an additional tag "from:username". This function is also useful if you need a mechanism for finally committing entries to someone else, eg as project deliverable, see http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/nepomuk (which is reused here) for an example.

For turning a normal user account into a group account, write an e-mail to webmaster@bibsonomy.org . We will then make this user the group admin.