Feature of the Week: user-based document sharing for groups

While using the group system, you’ve probably noticed that your uploaded documents can be shared with other group members. Unfortunately, the corresponding setting could only be managed by the group admin. So whenever you uploaded a document to your post, you had no control whether it will be shared with that group or not. This might cause copyright issues or other problems. To solve this, we’ve added a new feature to our group system: user-based document sharing. You can now manually decide whether to share your documents with each of your groups or not. This setting is accessed via the sidebar on the settings page (Note: the links are only visible if the group allows document sharing):

As a result documents will only be displayed to you when

• you're the owner of the post.
• you and the posts owner have a group in common, where the owner as well as the group allows document sharing.

Keep in mind this only affects the sharing of uploaded documents and not the post itself.

Happy tagging!

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!

Feature of the week: Discussed pages for groups

In a science group two important aspects of the work with literature are the processes of sharing it and of exchanging ideas and thoughts about it among the colleagues in your team. For the latter, we have introduced the discussion features last year.
With the last release we added a new page, that facilitates discussions within a group. Similar to the general discussed posts page and the discussed posts pages for single users, the new page displays the posts, discussed by members of a group.

It can be reached eiter

• using the URL: www.BibSonomy.org/discussed/group/ (e.g. www.BibSonomy.org/discussed/group/kde for the group kde) or
• via the group menu in the navigation bar:
  

The new page gives you an overview about what is going on in your group. It is especially useful in combination with the group privacy setting of discussion contributions (reviews and comments). The combination allows for a group-internal discussion in which the group's members can find out, what colleagues have read and especially, what colleagues liked and disliked.

Using the group discussions can be a real time saver. Before reading a new paper, simply check if someone in your group has not already read it and thus can tell you about it. On the other hand, you can use comments and reviews to tell your colleagues about great publications or warn them about bad ones.

If you are part of a research group, you might also want to take a look at our "usecase group discussion" in BibSonomy's help section.

Enjoy interesting discussions!
Stephan

Feature of the week: "relevant for"

Usually we try to write a FOW every week but the last one is three weeks old. We are currently very busy since there are several things going on. Besides the ongoing work to improve BibSonomy (fixing bugs and implementing new features) we are also actively working on new research results. Further, the deadline for this year's ECML PKDD Discovery Challenge is approaching and we need to prepare some things for that. E.g., we were able to get very nice prices. The challenge is still runing... But this are only side remarks.

Back to this week's FOW: With the March 2009 release we introduced a new group feature called "relevant for", with which group members can particularly flag posts. Why do we need this new group feature? The implementation of our group system follows two main ideas. On the one hand, it is designed to provide access rights, which means that users can restrict the access of a post to the members of a certain group (only group members can then see this post). On the other hand, it is a system to collect posts of group members which allows for aggregation. Due to a lot of support requests we realized that this kind of combination is not very
intuitive. So we searched for a way to maintain both parts but separate them and make the whole system easier to use. The "relevant for" feature is our solution to overcome this problem. The corresponding page is intended to support groups -- especially research groups -- by collecting bookmarks and publication with a special topic. As it is possible to choose more than one group a post is relevant for, posts can be dedicated to more than one group.

Let me explain how it works. The way we implemented this feature is as a system tag. What does this mean? On the bottom right hand side of the posting dialog you find a form called "relevant for" which contains a list of all of your groups. You can choose one or more group you think the post is relevant for. If done so, the post is annotated with special tags "sys:relevantfor:groupname" for each group and these tags are stored as usual tags and can also be changed by the user. We are working on a mechanism to hide these system tags from the usual website and tag clouds but currently this feature is not yet finished. To make the system tag useful, we implemented a special page "/relevantfor/group/groupname" which shows a collection of all posts tagged with the corresponding system tag for this group. This feature is
independent from the access rights of groups. As long as the user has the rights to see the post he will see the post on the corresponding pages.

To summarize it: groups are no longer only for access rights but also topical groups and if someone is interested to open such a group, we suggest to just register an account, send us a an email, and we will turn the account into a group and you can work with it.

Feature of the Week: Shared (PDF) document management with BibSonomy

When managing a literature database, often people want to store a full-text copy (e.g., a PDF document) of a publication in addition to its metadata (i.e., BibTex entry). To enable an easy access from everywhere to these documents, BibSonomy allows to upload a private PDF or postscript copy for each post via the post details page, e.g. for my case:

http://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/283b2de310e014240257ea3ee774213aa/dbenz

(Please note that only the owner of the entry can upload such a file). In the past, BibSonomy has treated these files as private only, i.e, they were only available for download to the owner himself. After several inquiries, we have opened up this restriction to groups: It is now possible to easily share PDF documents within your research colleagues. By default, when you are logged in as a group member (e.g. of the group kde), then you see a little document icon on the group page next to those entries for which any group member has uploaded a document:

http://www.bibsonomy.org/group/kde


(Please note again that you can only see the attached documents when you are a member of group kde.) You can disable this feature by appending ?showPDF=false to the URL. If you would like to restrict your view to only those documents with an attached document, use:

http://www.bibsonomy.org/group/kde?filter=myGroupPDF

Apart from that, your own documents are also accessible via your personal user page (you need to be logged in for that):

http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/dbenz
displays your own entries, along with document icons, if available

http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/dbenz?filter=myPDF
displays only those entries out of your collection which have a document attached

We think that this feature contributes to the usefulness of BibSonomy as a complete collaborative literature database tool for research groups! If you have suggestions how this can be improved, we'd be glad to hear from you.

Best,
Dominik

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.