Feature of the Week: Optimize your Firefox Browser for BibSonomy

How often do you use the search box of BibSonomy?

You can speed up searching in BibSonomy considerably by creating some
smart keywords in your Firefox webbrowser.
Afterwards, you can access all your posts with a certain tag with just some keystrokes. This blog post explains how to do this.

First try: Speed up fulltext search

1. Navigate to www.bibsonomy.org.
2. Right-click on the BibSonomy search box that says fulltext search here. Select Add a Keyword for this Search...
   
3. In the dialog that appears, enter a short keyword, e.g., bs (like BibSonomy search).
   
   
4. Fill the remaining fields and click Save.

Now you can search in BibSonomy by entering into your browser's location bar (reach it quickly with CTRL + L) the string bs SEARCHTERM, e.g., bs firefox and pressing ENTER. Firefox will then search for the term SEARCHTERM in BibSonomy, e.g., bs firefox opens www.bibsonomy.org/search/firefox.

Next steps: Add more keywords

Adding smart keywords for other search options in BibSonomy is now easy: just select the corresponding option in the dropdown box

and repeat the steps above with a new keyword. Here are some suggestions:

bt

search for a tag (e.g., /tag/firefox)

ba

search for an author (e.g., /author/Stumme)

bm

search for one of your tags (e.g. /user/jaeschke/myown). This is explained in the next step.

Finally: Quickly access your own posts

Adding a smart keyword to access your posts having a certain tag is now straightforward: go to your BibSonomy page and right-click into the enter tag(s) here field at the top. Again, select Add a Keyword for this Search...

and enter an appropriate keyword (e.g., bm for my tags).

Here I describe a more advanced method that searches for concepts instead of tags. Note that this works even if you don't have relations defined, yet!

1. Go to www.bibsonomy.org/concept/user/jaeschke/arbitrary_tag and exchange the user name in the URL by your user name, e.g., replace "jaeschke" by your user name. Press ENTER.
2. Right-Click in the input box containing the string arbitrary_tag and select Add a Keyword for this Search...:
   
   
   
   
3. Again, enter a smart keyword (I would suggest to use bm as described above.).
4. Search for your posts by entering bm TAGNAME into the location bar of your browser (remember CTRL-C).

Nothing new so far, except for the somehow difficult to access concept search field. But what are the benefits of /concept/user/jaeschke/programming compared to /user/jaeschke/programming? Well, I have created some relations using the tag editor of BibSonomy. One of them says that the tags ada, c, fortran, java, lisp, perl, python, and ruby are sub-tags of the tag (or better concept) programming:

Now, whenever I search for /concept/user/jaeschke/programming, I get all posts having the tag programming or one of its sub-tags, i.e., ada, c, fortran, java, lisp, perl, python, or ruby.

This way I can structure my tag space - and more important - use a logical OR in my queries.

More information about concepts and relations can be found here:

• BibSonomy Help: URL Scheme Semantics
• BibSonomy Help: Relations
• BibSonomy Blog: Relations
• BibSonomy Blog: Relations (revisited)
• BibSonomy Blog: Retrieve resources by disjunction of tags

Feature of the week: Relations

Feature of the week: Relations

The last major release included some overhaul on the relations-page.
Everything is now better-arranged and more beautiful. Especially the representation of the sets of subtags as tagclouds improves clarity. The tagsize of a subtag indicates the frequency with which it is used in relation with its supertag. A counter on each tag tells that frequency exactly. Respectively, counter and tagsize of a supertag tell you how many of our users consider this tag a concept.

For those of you wondering what relations are and how to use them:
In BibSonomy, a relation consists of two tags, SUBTAG -> SUPERTAG. On the relations-page you'll find e. g. the following relation: 'algebra' -> 'mathematics'. It means that 'mathematics' is the supertag (also called a concept) of 'algebra', and the relation could be read as 'algebra is a subdiscipline of mathematics'.

You can define and manage your own relations on the edit_tags-page. Or you can enter a relation in the tag field while posting or editing a bookmark/publication. Just use SUBTAG->SUPERTAG (without any white space) as a tag.

As a matter of fact, relations are quite a useful tool in retrieving resources.
Let's stay with our example. Say you are interested in posts to the field of 'mathematics'. Then searching for 'mathematics' as a tag will find you all the posts explicitly tagged with 'mathematics'. Searching for 'mathematics' as a concept, however, will find in addition all the posts tagged with a subtag thereof (in our case e. g. algebra).

Furthermore, you will be able to distinguish whether you are interested in relations of only one specific user or in everybody's relations via
http://www.bibsonomy.org/concept/tag/CONCEPTNAME
vs.
http://www.bibsonomy.org/concept/user/USERNAME/CONCEPTNAME.
Of course, navigation via hyperlinks is also possible! Try e. g. clicking on a conceptname on the relations-page and then note the sidebar.

Relations allow you to widen your search and tag in your own hierarchical way.
So give it a try!

Feature of the week: Retrieve resources by disjunction of tags

A very common way to browse through your own or other people's repository on BibSonomy is via one or more tags, e.g.

http://www.bibsonomy.org/tag/semantic+web.

Hereby, the tag-based retrieval is done in a conjunctive manner, i.e., the result of this query will comprise all bookmarks and publications tagged with semantic AND web. We are often asked if we offer any other possibiliby of combined tag queries, e.g. by disjunction - one might e.g. be interested in all resources tagged with semanticweb OR ontologies.

This behaviour is not accessible via a specific URL scheme, but can be achieved by invoking an old BibSonomy buddy - namely concepts! As you will know, BibSonomy allows you to define relations between tags in the form:

SUPERTAG <- SUBTAG

(see also http://www.bibsonomy.org/relations). A supertag along with all its subtags is denoted a concept in BibSonomy, which can be used to retrieve resources like this:

http://www.bibsonomy.org/concept/tag/ontology

The characteristics of this retrieval method is now that all resources are returned which are tagged with ontology OR one of its subtags. This constitutes, in fact, a retrieval of resources by a disjunction of tags. We are aware that this has some limitations, as a concept has to be defined before this type of query is possible - but facing a tradeoff between efficient query processing and freedom of query formulation has led us to this decision, with the ultimate goal to keep our service highly responsive for all of you as our users.

Feature of the Week: Relations

Sometimes I want to have some means of structuring my tag cloud. For example, I tag a lot of researchers' home pages with their last names as tag. So I want to have all these last names together in one spot.

Furthermore, why do I have to say event every time when I tag something with conference, just so I can also retrieve it under the more general term?

Relations

To solve both problems, BibSonomy has introduced relations. A relation between two tags signifies that one of the tags is regarded as a generalization of the other.

When I tag something with conference, and I have the relation conference->event stored in BibSonomy, I say that I also consider that resource I tagged to be concerned with event in some sense.

Relations can be entered just in the way shown above: just write an arrow "->" or "<-" between two tags. The tag pointed to will be the more general one. This can also be chained: you can tag, say, a page related to pet cats with cats->pets->animal.

We call those tags that are more general than another tag, i.e., those at the pointy end of an arrow, concepts.

Using Relations

Now how can relations be used? First, they appear in your tag box on the right hand side. Note the upward and downward arrows next to all tags that are concepts. Clicking on an upward arrow shows the relations of that concept, clicking the downward arrow hides them.

Second, you can use concepts to retrieve posts. Note that when on a tag page, such as http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/schmitz/linux, you will be offered the possibility of seeing the tag linux as a concept. That way, you will also see those resources not tagged with linux themselves, but with a direct subtag thereof, for example ubuntu (assuming I have the relation ubuntu->linux in my relations).

Editing Relations

Entering relations can be done on the fly, with the arrow notation shown above. They can be browsed under the myRelations link. If you want to edit your relations, hit the edit tags link in the top right corner. You will be offered the option of adding and removing relations. Furthermore, note that when renaming a tag (say, you've made a typo and spelled ubutnu instead of ubuntu), there is an option on the edit tags page to update relations containing that tag, too.



Have fun,

Christoph