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: Reviews and Discussion

Two important aspects of working with literature are the process of sharing it among your colleagues and the exchange of ideas and thoughts about it. Facilitating the first aspect - sharing - has always been a core feature of BibSonomy. However, this weeks blog post is all about the second aspect: Discussion!

BibSonomy's new and easy to use discussion feature is your forum to communicate your thoughts about publications and websites quickly to your friends and colleagues. Using the typical thread structure of forums users can add reviews or comments to publication and bookmark posts or reply to previous statements by other users.

Where can I discuss?


If you take a look at any page in BibSonomy with a post list (e.g. home), you'll find a link reading "discussion" right next to each post's copy link and a five star rating below each post. Clicking on either takes you to the discussion page of that web page or publication, that the post is about.
You may discuss about any posted resource (web page or publication) even if you did not post it yourself! Keep in mind, that several posts (e.g. from different users) can be about the same resource. Since the discussions are always about the resources (never about specific posts) the discussion links of such posts all lead to the same discussion.
As an example, take a look at a short discussion about an html5 web page.

How can I discuss?

There are two ways to start a discussion or to add to one. For both of them you will have to be logged in.

• Reviews: Reviews are designed to let you state your opinion. Each review contains a rating of up to five stars. (Yes, we allow the assignment of half stars and even of zero stars for the worst case!)
  Additionally you can enter some text to explain your rating. You can add at most one review to a discussion. However, you can always edit or even delete your review.
• Comments: Use comments to enter some text without assigning a rating. Choose to comment on a posted resource directly or reply to previous reviews or comments. Basically, you can comment as often as you like and edit or delete your comments at any time. To create a comment just click the blue create comment button. To comment in reply to another user's statement use the reply link below that statement.
  

Who can read it?

Both, comments and reviews come with two visibility settings.

• The first controls the visibility of your user name. If you check anonymous, nobody (except you) will see who made the statement.
• The second option is similar to the viewable-for option during the regular posting and controls the visibility of the complete review or comment. You can set your statement viewable for anyone (public), for a group or for your friends (other) or only for yourself (private).
  

Everyone can discuss everyone's posted resources. Thus, the fact that you might own a post which has a rating, does not imply that you where the one rating it.

What do the stars represent?

When writing a review, the stars you assign represent your personal opinion about the publication or web page that is discussed.
The stars displayed next to each post represent the average rating over all reviews. The discussion page also shows a distribution of all ratings. The average also includes the ratings of reviews that have a limited visibility (and thus might be invisible to you).

What should I write?

The discussion feature is intended enable a lively online discussion about published literature and web pages. From a simple one-liner to your full-blown and detailed scientific review everything is welcome.
We hope, that the new feature will facilitate communication and improve the exchange of thoughts and ideas about news, trends and the state of the art in science.

Happy reviewing, rating, commenting, discussing and (as always) tagging!
Stephan

Release 2.0.16

With some delay, today we upgraded BibSonomy to 2.0.16. We also updated our publicly available libraries at our Maven repository.
We are happy to announce, that this release includes the first version of a new major feature: Discussions and Reviews. We'll go into detail about that in our next blog post. But take a look at the stars you'll now find at the bottom right of every post and the new discussion link under each post.
Furthermore, new are:

• two new hidden system-tags: sys:unfiled and sys:jabRef:<someArgument>
  
• the extended functionality of the URL-parameter sortPage (sorting bookmarks is now possible)
  
• more allowed file types for your private document upload.
  

The next release is scheduled for July 27th.

Happy tagging!
Stephan

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.