Feature of the Week: New version of JabRef-plugin released!

As you will have noticed, we are maintaining a plugin for the open-source bibliography manager JabRef, which allows to easily download and upload entries from BibSonomy. We believe that this approach nicely combines the advantages of maintaining a local BibTeX-file with the comfort and usefulness of a centralized publication sharing platform like BibSonomy.

We have just now released a new version of this plugin, which offers some nice features to ease the maintenance of both collections (local + within BibSonomy)! Check it out:

• Added document management: In JabRef and within BibSonomy, it is possible to attach a private copy (PDF, PS, ...) to a publication entry. The new version of our plugin allows to download all your private documents present in BibSonomy by a single click (first image). Furthermore, you can control in the settings menu that local documents are automatically uploaded to BibSonomy when you storethe publication (second image).

• Automatic Synchronization: A typical problem is to keep both collections (your local .bib file and your BibSonomy account) synchronized. We are proud to offer a comfortable feature to automatically perform this task (third image on the right). This feature automatically checks for entries present in both collections if they are equal; if there is a difference, you can decide which version to keep. A 'diff-like' view helps you to see what has changed (4th image on the right).

• Full-text search: In prior versions, it was only possible to retrieve posts from BibSonomy by tag. Now you can also perform a full-text search in your personal or in the global collection.
• Further small additions & bugfixes: Apart from the above-mentioned new features, we improved the interface, fixed some bugs, and generally made the plugin more stable and better :)

You can download the latest version of the plugin here: The updated documentation can be accessed via http://www.bibsonomy.org/help/doc/jabref-plugin/index.html. We hope this new release helps you to be more efficient in your personal and shared publication managent - we are as usual always happy about feedback, comments, suggestions!!

Best,
Dominik

Main Server Crashed

Today we had a crash of our main machine. It took us 1 hour to restart everything as it was late and no one was in the office. This was the reason BibSonomy was not available. Unfortunately this is the third time within 4 weeks that the machine crashed. We are now searching for the reason but currently we have no clue as we did not observe any special situation. It seem to be some strange hardware defect. Lets cross the finger that we can figure out the problem soon.

New Release

Those of you which have recently tried to delete a post probably have noticed a small but helpful change: a dialog box is now asking you for confirmation. If you accidentally clicked on the "delete" link, you have now the chance to stop the process. If you don't like this feature: just disable it on the settings page and you get back the old behaviour.

This is just one of the changes the new release contains but obviously the most noticeable one. Furthermore, we updated the code to import bookmarks from Delicious and Firefox, to upload JabRef layouts and to pick/unpick posts for the basket. Several smaller bugfixes also made it into the release.

As always a small sidenote: although we tested the code, it might contain bugs we did not find. So if you think you've found an error, don't hesitate to contact us!

Tagging for Championship

As a social bookmarking system, assigning tags to resources is one of BibSonomy's most important and frequent processes. Since a while, the user is assisted by a set of recommended tags as shown in Figure 1.

The Challenge

Recommender systems are subject to active research and different approaches emerged. In the context of this year's ECML PKDD Discovery Challenge, BibSonomy's tag recommendations were provided by 14 different recommender systems from 10 different research teams in 7 different countries during the last five weeks. The challenge consisted of three tasks where the first two tasks were dealing with fixed datasets obtained from BibSonomy, while the third task's subject was to provide tag recommendations to the user in the running system.

Yesterday, during the ECML PKDD Discovery Challenge Workshop, the challenge's participants presented their recommender systems and discussed the different approaches, still ignorant of the third task's winning team, which finally was announced in the evening during the conference's opening session.

Rating the Systems

Algorithms for tag recommendations are typically evaluated by computing some performance measure in an "off-line" setting, that is, by iterating over posts in a dataset, which was derived from a social bookmarking system, presenting only a user and a resource to the recommender system. Thus, for each post, the set of suggested tags can be compared with those the user had assigned. Participants in Task 1 and Task 2 were evaluated in such a setting.

But these "off-line" settings not only ignore some constraints in real live applications (e.g. cpu usage and memory consumption), they also can't take into account the effect of presenting a set of recommended tags to the user. To evaluate these effects, we set up Task 3, were recommender systems were integrated into BibSonomy and the recommender systems had to deliver their tag recommendations within a timeout of 1000 ms.

For evaluating the different recommender systems (in the off-line settings as well as Task 3), we calculated precision and recall for each system. While precision measures, how many recommended tags where adequate, recall takes into account, how many of the tags the user actually assigned to the resource where recommended.

Figure 2 shows the final results of the on-line challenge (which is available here). For each recommender system, we calculated precision and recall, considering only the first n tags (for n=1,2,..., 5) and averaged over all posts. The top blue graph for example shows, that from the corresponding recommender system's five recommended tags (the very right point) around 18% were chosen by the user (precision 0.18) and around 23% of the tags which the user finally assigned to the resource were "predicted" by the recommender.



The winning teams are:

• Task 1: Marek Lipczak, Yeming Hu, Yael Kollet, and Evangelos Milios (Paper)


• Task 2: Steffen Rendle and Lars Schmidt-Thieme (Paper)


• Task 3: Marek Lipczak, Yeming Hu, Yael Kollet, and Evangelos Milios (Paper)

We are happy to say, that it was an interesting challenge which gave substantial insight into the performance of different approaches to the task of tag recommendation. We'd like to thank everybody who contributed to this challenge - last but not least each of BibSonomy's users.

PUMA - Project on Academic Publication Management started on August 1st

BibSonomy technology will be used in a project that fosters the open access movement and a better support of the researchers publications work. The project "PUMA - Academic Publication Management" is funded by the German Research Foundation DFG and has been started on August 1st, 2009. PUMA is a joint project of the University Library and the Knowledge & Data Engineering Group of the University of Kassel.

Open access is a publication model that allows authors to publish their articles free of charge, and users to freely access them. The costs are borne by the institution that is providing the institutional repository. There are several reasons for this publication model. With reduced budgets and increased costs for journals, many university libraries cannot afford the subscription of all relevant journals any longer. Furthermore, open access supports a timely publication and broader visibility of articles so that research results can be taken up earlier and by more researchers, decreasing thus the turn around time of scientific results.

Even though many researchers support the open access movement in principle, they often do not contribute their publications to the institutional repository of their university. Key reasons are that they do not see an immediate benefit from this additional effort, and that the upload is not integrated in their usual work flow. PUMA aims therefore for an integrated solution, where the upload of a publication results automatically in an update of both the personal and institutional homepage, the creation of an entry in BibSonomy, an entry in the academic reporting system of the university, and its publication in the institutional repository. At the time of upload, meta data from several data sources (SHERPA/RoMEO list, online library catalogue, BibSonomy) will be collected automatically in order to support the user. Further, PUMA aims to provide a publication management platform for all researchers and students to be used on a daily basis, which reduces not only the open access publication effort but also the effort to manage one's own publications.

The PUMA platform will be based on BibSonomy technology and will be hosted by the University Library; it will be setup in a Web 2.0 style. The platform will include all features known from BibSonomy, like tagging of publications, easy usage, an API and scalability. BibSonomy will continue to be run by the Knowledge & Data Engineering Group. As a showcase, PUMA will be integrated with the open access repository platform DSpace, the libary system PICA, the Typo3 content management system, and BibSonomy. The system is open for adaption to other standard systems. The project results will be published as open source software. This implies that the complete BibSonomy source code will become available under an open source licence at the end of the project.

Feature of the week: Stay tuned to interesting content by following interesting users

A good starting point when searching for interesting resources in BibSonomy are other users with similar interests. In a prior post, we showed how BibSonomy can help you to discover these similar users. We're now happy to announce a new feature which makes it easy for you to keep track of interesting resources of these people - you can now just follow them!

The basic idea is like this: Once you stumble upon a user who seems to be interesting, you can use the follow-link on his user page to add him to your list of followed users. Think of this list as a buddy list of people with similar interests as you have. Here are two examples where you can find this link (on the user page and on the personalized user page):

On the followers page, you find then a list of all users you are following (and all users following you :) ). This page summarizes all recent posts of all users you are following, ranked personally for you. So the most relevant posts to you are shown at the top of the resource lists (we compute relevancy based on the tags you use). Here is what this page looks like:
You can also add and remove users from your list of followed users on this page. In addition, you can change some settings of the applied ranking algorithm and see which method is best in finding the most relevant posts for you.

Feel free to play around with this feature - we hope it can help you to "dig" through the resources of users with similar interests and finally find some pretty cool and relevant stuff for you!

Best,
Dominik

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.

New Features released: Similar users + Personalization

Today we've performed a release of BibSonomy, containing some new interesting features you might find helpful! The first one addresses the common problem of finding other BibSonomy users with similar interests as oneself; they might be a great source for interesting content like recent publications or up-to-date bookmarks. On your personal user page (i.e. in the "MyBibSonomy" area), you'll find in the sidebar a new list with "similar users":
We've computed these using several similarity measures - when you click on "more", you can check which one is best for you. When you click on one of the user names, you'll be directed to a personalized page which looks like this:
The main idea behind this personalization is to help you finding the interesting content of this user for you; we're comuting a personalized ranking which sorts this user's posts according to your interests. The tag cloud shows this user's tags, which are probably interesting for you.

This personalization feature is also available when you browse in the "usual way" on a user page - there we provide a "personalize"-Link at the top:
Besides that, this release contains a number of small fixes & improvements - if you happen to encounter any irregularity, we'd be happy to hear from you so that we can fix the problem. Besides that - feel invited to play around with our new features and get the most out of BibSonomy!

Best,
Dominik

Typo3 Extension for BibSonomy available

Typo3 is a popular open-source content management system, used by a large number of private and corporate websites. It offfers among others a generic extension architecture, which enables developers to add custom functionality to Typo3-based websites.

For many websites in academic contexts (e.g. personal homepages of researchers, universities, research projects, ...), an important building block is an up-to-date publication list. Maintaining these lists manually is a tedious task; in order to ease this process, we have developed a versatile BibSonomy Typo3 Extension! The core concept is to keep all references cleanly stored inside BibSonomy (leveraging all useful BibSonomy features like import from different formats, scraping services, ...) and to generate automatically a publication list from this data. Have a look here what it can look like:

• http://cms.uni-kassel.de/unicms/index.php?id=iteg_publikationen0

In order to set up such a nice publication list with the BibSonomy Typo3 plugin, you need to follow these simple steps:

1. Store the relevant publications in BibSonomy
2. Install the BibSonomy Typo3-Plugin in your Typo3 installation (Download it from here)
3. Configure the plugin (e.g. select which entries to display, select the layout, ...)
4. You're done! :)
   

For each of these steps we have written an extensive online documentation. Our plugin is already part of the official Typo3 installation of the University of Kassel! We offer a number of predefined standard layouts (Harvard, DIN1505...) for formatting the publication lists; in addition, it is possible to use customized layouts based on a JabRef Layout Filter.

Apart from publication lists, the plugin is also able to display tag clouds which can be embedded into websites to visualize e.g. research interests of a group or an individual. We hope that this plugin is another step towards making BibSonomy more useful for you in the process of managing bibliographic data in an integrated and unified way. The BibSonomy team is of course also open to comments and suggestions!

Best,
Dominik

FOW: Publication details

Before leaving for a bycicle trip along the Weser river :-), I'd like to point your attention to a recent change in the presentation of a user's publication details.

Different features were included to make the metadata more representable. At the page's beginning, users can select different citation formats (e.g. Harvard, DIN1505) to represent the reference.



The next sections have only slightly changed. You can enter a link to the publication's provider, or upload a private copy of the document in question in the Resources section. The Abstract and Private Note section allow you to store informational and personal information. Finally, metadata can be changed or enhanced in the BibTex and Endnote record fields.

The sidebar gives the option to edit your tags. Additionally, tags that have been associated with this publication are shown. Those tags, that have been added by yourself, are underlined. To find out who else is interested in this publication, have a look at the related users.

If you wish to include a specific citation style, miss an important feature related to your publication metadata or have a brilliant idea how to further organise this page,
please contact us.

Happy easter!

Beate