Making BibSonomy integration smoother: New features for the University of Cologne's library users

The idea of BibSonomy (and other social bookmarking systems) is to allow users to manage their references, but also to provide a facility to browse interesting content. This property makes social bookmarking systems interesting to digital library users. Offering a functionality to export a library's metadata into BibSonomy allows the library's users to collect metadata from their (probably different) local libraries, to describe their resources and to share the information on a wider basis than just with other local library users.

The library of the University of Cologne (KUG) is promoting the idea of integrating libraries with user-created bookmarking systems. They already offer tagging services for their local entries.
Recently, they enhanced their service by integrating the tagging information into BibSonomy and providing BibSonomy information to their users. Two major features have been implemented to realize this:

* a browser for BibSonomy sources
* a mirrow of tagging activities

An example is given with the following link:
http://kug5.ub.uni-koeln.de/portal/connector/permalink/inst006/6439/1/inst006/index.html

The main feature, storing the metadata in BibSonomy is still provided with a simple link to the BibSonomy publication metadata interface where you can add tags and cross-check the reference data fields. Additionally, the KUG page shows related tags to a resource in the right menu bar. If you click on one of those tags, you can browse further publications and bookmarks related to the clicked tag. The related resources are either retrieved from the library or from
BibSonomy. This allows users to view a broader set of resources than only the library's entries without having to switch to the BibSonomy interface. Shortly, the mirrow feature will be activated. If users then add keywords to a resource in the KUG interface, the keywords will be automatically added to their BibSonomy entries. If the title did not exist in the user's BibSonomy resource list, it is stored automatically. Thus, the user's local collection is maintained automatically in the social bookmarking system.

The integration of the library's web application with BibSonomy is based on our API.
A more detailed description of the new feature is provided here.

Thanks to the OpenBib team for developing this functionality!

Beate

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

ECML/PKDD Discovery Challenge

Since we're organising this year's Discovery Challenge, we would like to announce the

Call for Participation

ECML/PKDD Discovery Challenge

Antwerp, Belgium, 15 Sept. 2008

This year's discovery challenge deals with two tasks in the area of social bookmarking. One task covers spam detection and the other is about tag recommendations. The dataset the challenge is based on is a snapshot of BibSonomy. More details about the tasks can be found at the challenge website.

Important dates

May 5, 2008

Tasks and datasets available online.

July 30th, 2008

Test dataset will be released (by midnight CEST).

August 1st, 2008

Result submission deadline (by midnight CEST).

August 4th, 2008

Workshop paper submission deadline.

August 8th 2008

Notification of winners,
publication of results on webpage,
notification of paper acceptance.

August 14th, 2008

Workshop proceedings (camera-ready) deadline.

September 15/19th, 2008

ECML/PKDD 2008 Workshop

Feature of the Week: Similiar Tags

Since this week tag pages in BibSonomy like /tag/ontology also show similiar tags. They're located below the related tags we provide on each tag page in the sidebar. You can use similiar tags for navigation when you're looking for posts related to a certain tag which might have been tagged with not the same but other, similiar tags.

More information on similiar tags can be found in the FAQ and in the online help.

Feature of the Week: Integrate BibSonomy Tag Clouds in your website

BibSonomy now offers the opportunity to integrate its tag clouds into your private website. For this purpose it provides a JSON feed containing the retrieved tags which are filled in your cloud dynamically by a JavaScript snippet. At the moment this feature is only available for the BibTeX page but will be extended to all pages offering tag clouds in the near future.

In this example you see a tag cloud with related tags to this publication.



You can choose between an alphabetical or a frequency order and define a limit of shown tags. Just follow these few steps in the tutorial to integrate such a tag cloud in your website. There you can also find a test tag cloud where you can check the functionality by specifying several arguments.

If you have questions or comments, don't hesitate to contact us.

Stefan

See the BibSonomy API in action with WizTools.org RESTClient 2.1

When developing RESTful applications or accessing such services, it can be of great help to have a handy tool to try out its different functionalities. A useful application to this end is the WizTools.org RESTClient. It provides a slim and convenient interface to test HTTP methods like POST, GET, DELETE or PUT, along with the possiblity to edit a variety of parameters for each request.

A tutorial to access our BibSonomy API with this tool is found here:

http://java.dzone.com/announcements/wiztoolsorg-restclient-21-rele

We think that this example demonstrates well both the capabilities of the RESTClient application and our API!

Best,
Dominik

Feature of the Week: BibSonomy on your iPhone

Use your iPhone for accessing BibSonomy! @BibSonomy is a website written by Nils Windisch that shows the five most recent/popular bookmarks and publications from BibSonomy, and is optimized to look good on your iPhone. Nils suggests that "the best use case is probably waiting for the bus or being bored in school seminars as @BibSonomy just gives you a quick and easy glance of what’s up at BibSonomy." Read more at http://nilswindisch.de/code/iphone/bibsonomy/.

We stronlgy encourage and support the integration of BibSonomy data in 3rd party applications, as demonstrated by @BibSonomy. If you're interested in building your own application, have a look at our API, which should provide all necessary integration facilites.

Easteregg of the Week: BibSonomy Link on Websites

Some websites such as the German news magazine Spiegel provide a link or a button on their web pages so that a page’s visitor can easily store the page in a social bookmarking system. For example, the column Zwiebelfisch about the specialities of the German language shows a "Bookmark" link above the title. Providing such a link has several advantages for providers and users: on the one hand, being visible in a social bookmarking system can increase the popularity of the website, on the other hand users get the possibility to store interesting web resources at a central place.

The technique to include such a link or button on your website is simple and can be realized by including a small javascript into your html code. For people interested in offering such a link or button to store bookmarks in BibSonomy we now provide the javascript code on the following BibSonomy page. Just try it on your website or blog – it is really easy!

Beate

Feature of the Week: BibSonomy Inside

As started in the last feature of the week we release this week additional information about BibSonomy which will help to integrate BibSonomy into other services like catalog systems of libraries. As discussed the former FOTW BibSonomy relies on different hash keys to find similar publications. The needed information to compute these keys is described here. The page includes a small demo and a java example implementation which is used in BibSonomy to compute the different hash keys. This implementation can be used to compute the same hash keys in other system. Together with the possibility to access the tag cloud of a publication by a hash via BibSonomy's API a nice integration and a community summary of a publication can be integrated into every system.

We think this is a first step for a tighter integration of Bibsonomy and libraries catalog systems or any other similar system.

Feature of the Week: Tags for Resources

If you're using the API and are interested in all tags users have assigned to a specific resource, you now have the possibility to get the tags by using the API-URL http://www.bibsonomy.org/api/tags with the parameter "resource=[hash]" (together with the parameter "resourcetype"). E.g., a request to /api/tags?resourcetype=bookmark&resource=64122a860e632f5ed0148740e25239e6 gives you all tags for the bookmark with the hash 64122a860e632f5ed0148740e25239e6. This allows you to include all tags related to a resource in your application.

Please note, that you have to use the interHash of a resource (as given in the XML output of the API) for this functionality. Further information can be found in the API documentation.

Note: When using hashes of BibTeX posts from the BibSonomy web interface links (e.g., /bibtex/295b16cdb7731d697234d355fc4e68fe3), one must be careful to pick the "correct" hash. In the links all intra-hashes currently have a "2" and all inter-hashes a "1" prepended and are thus 33 characters long (compare /bibtex/295b16cdb7731d697234d355fc4e68fe3/emanuel with /bibtex/1148dc0c64433f631174b5fc419597dd6). This is to distinguish several types of hashes in the web interface (the "old" intra-hashes which started with a "0" still work!). So when using a hash from the web interface, care must be taken that it is really an intra-hash (e.g., starts with a "2") and before querying the API the preceeding "2" must be removed.
We will shortly extend the API to also accept 33 characters long intra-hashes.