Feature of the Week: Customizable Publication Exports

Many of you may already be using the export facilities for publication entries that BibSonomy offers; until recently, there were options to export your BibTeX as RSS, RDF, Endnote, or one particular plain HTML format.

Now we've revamped the export facilities by including the export layout engine from the great JabRef stand-alone BibTeX manager. Clicking on the more button next to the publication column header will take you to a list of publication output formats that are now available—right now there are 17! These include an RTF export for standard text processors such as Word, CSV which is easily imported to spreadsheets, as well as fancy HTML tables with sorting capabilities that you can integrate right into you web site.

Here are some examples:

• CSV for spreadsheets
• Fancy HTML table
  
• RTF for Word and other text processors
  
• DocBook XML

If there is still a layout missing that you need for your particular application, you can make your own! The JabRef documentation describes how custom export filters can be written using a special markup language. Once you've written your filter, you can upload three files: the piece of markup for formatting each entry, plus a custom header and footer; thus, you can get a complete, valid HTML page with your custom publication list out of BibSonomy which can directly be linked to without further processing. The URL scheme for these layouts is as follows: http://www.bibsonomy.org/layout/[filter]/[rest of BibSonomy URL] e.g. if I want to format my own publications of 2006 with the html filter: http://www.bibsonomy.org/layout/html/user/schmitz/myown+2006 See also Mark Schenk's page for some great examples of JabRef layouts.

Have fun!

Christoph

Feature of the week: Firefox integration

BibSonomy offers several facilities to retrieve bookmarks and publications from personal or public collections. An example is the fulltext search mentioned earlier in this blog. For everyday work, it is of great use when these facilities are integrated tightly into the usual working environment, e.g. into the accustomed web browser.

As most of BibSonomy's retrieval features can be accessed via a specific URL structure, the built-in keyword replacement mechanism of Mozilla Firefox provides an elegant mechanism for this purpose. To give an example, if you want to search bookmarks or publications inside your own collection that were tagged with a particular tag, you would have to do the following:

1. Create a new bookmark inside Firefox (via the usual Bookmarks > Bookmark Manager facility)
2. Enter the following details:
   

• Name: Search My BibSonomy
• URL: http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/[your_username]/%s
• Keyword: bs
  

Once this is accomplished, the personal collection can be searched directly via the Firefox address bar: Jump to the bar (e.g. by pressing CTRL + L), and type "bs" (i.e. the keyword that you just specified when creating the bookmark), followed by a space-separated list of the tags you would like to search for, e.g.

bs myown 2006

to retrieve all bookmarks and publications tagged with "myown" and "2006".

This method is obviously rather flexible and can be applied analogously to integrate e.g. global fulltext search. For this purpose, the URL in step (2) from above would have to be specified as http://www.bibsonomy.org/search/%s.

In combination with the keyboard shortcut to post a bookmark, a tight integration into Firefox is accomplished that eases every-day publication and bookmark management with BibSonomy.

Feature of the Week: Manage the publication lists of your homepage, research group homepage and research project homepage with BibSonomy!

Researchers usually have to report the publications they have written several times, often in different formats. Did you know that BibSonomy simplifies this tedious work? Stop reformatting and restructuring the list of your publications again and again for all the different web pages you usually have to maintain - e.g., your personal homepage, the homepage of your research group and/or department, the homepage of your research project, ...

How to do it? See some examples:
1. Personal tag clouds and publication lists. The tag cloud on my personal homepage and my publication list are generated from BibSonomy. The key idea is to use a specific tag in BibSonomy to mark all publications one has co-authored - in our case the tag "myown".
The web server of our research group queries every half an hour the URL http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/stumme to update the tag cloud and http://www.bibsonomy.org/publ/user/stumme/myown+2007?items=1000 (and similar pages for the earlier years) to update the publication list. The relevant HTML part is extracted, e.g., for the tag cloud everything between the start pattern <ul class="tagcloud" id="tagbox"> and the end pattern </ul>. The extraction process depends on the functionality of your web server, hence we cannot give general hints here. In our case, the formatting of the final tag cloud/publication list is realized with a css style sheet which is placed on the server of our research group. Instead of doing the layout of the extracted HTML on your own web server (eg by using css), you can alternatively export it directly in the desired format from BibSonomy, see "Feature of the Week: Customizable Publication Exports" for more details.

2. Publication lists of research groups and departments. The same data are used for displaying the publication list of our whole research group. This list is extracted from http://www.bibsonomy.org/publ/group/kde/myown+2007?items=1000 by selecting everything between the start pattern <h1>Publications</h1> and the end pattern </body>, as described above. In general, the group functionality allows to aggregate all entries (or only those entries tagged with a tag like "myown") of a group, see "Feature of the Week: Groups and Friends" for more details.

3. Publication lists of research projects. You can again reuse the same BibSonomy data for generating the publication lists of research projects. Two examples are the publication lists of the European projects TAGora and Nepomuk. For doing this, the project coordinator sets up a group account in BibSonomy, and the project partners should join this group (see again "Feature of the Week: Groups and Friends" for more details). Then there are two alternatives, depending on the requirements of the project: a) Define a specific tag, e.g. "tagorapub" as done for the publication list of the TAGora project. An author devoting a publication to the project marks the publication with the specified tag, and the project web server collects the data from BibSonomy (in the format that is most suitable for your web server, eg. from http://www.bibsonomy.org/swrc/group/tagora/tagorapub). b) Ask each project partner to tag the publication he devotes to the project with "for:". An example is the publication list of the Nepomuk project. The advantage of the second method: Once a publication is commited to a project, it cannot be withdrawn without explicit consent of the project coordinator. This feature is often required in projects where the coordinator is responsible for the reporting.

Feature of the Week: Using the Webservice with Python

Since more and more users want to use BibSonomy's Webservice, we put together an example how to retrieve posts programmatically - everything with Python. You can have a look at the script here.

If you want to get a list of your publications you would do this:

bibsonomy = BibSonomy('YOUR_USERNAME', 'YOUR_APIKEY')
posts = bibsonomy.getPosts('bibtex')
# do something with the posts...
for post in posts:
print post.resource.title

The last two lines iterate over the retrieved posts and display the title for every post. Have a look at the various classes (Post, BibTex, Tag, etc.) for more information about available attributes.

If you consider using the script and develop it futher, we would be happy to hear from you.

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.

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

Feature of the Week: Integration into your WordPress blog

Bloggers who are using WordPress may be interested in a plugin that helps them not only to integrate data from BibSonomy into posts and ordinary pages but (almost) automatically publish their posts on BibSonomy.

Once you've installed the plugin, go to Settings - BibSonomy and at least enter your username and API key. Then test your setup with a click on Show posts, select a post and submit it with a click on Post selection - your post will appear as a new bookmark on BibSonomy.

While it's a really nice thing to have your blog posts synchronized with BibSonomy another powerful feature is to integrate your bookmarks, publications or tags into your content. Publishing your tag cloud from BibSonomy boils down to this simple shortcode: [bibsonomy-tags]. More complex requests like retrieving the three most recent publications that are tagged with folksonomy is possible too: [bibsonomy-posts resourceType="bibtex" tags="folksonomy" end="3"]. Have a look at more examples.

From a developers point of view this plugin is powered by an implementation of BibSonomy's webservice in PHP. If you want to build something on top of that, you can download the API here. We're really interested in your feedback, so don't hesitate to write us about your experience.

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

CiteSmart

Last year in November we were contacted by Mounir Errami, the project leader of MireSoft. He suggested a partnership with us. MireSoft has a product called CiteSmart, which is a citation software. It nicely integrates with Word and builds a bridge between web-based tools like BibSonomy or Connotea. It is easing the way to takeover the data from web application and it is able to produces references in various formats for articles written in Word. In this way, it allows to easily write scientific articles and supports the scientific work of researchers. Here is a screenshot:



We support this partnership as we think that BibSonomy needs to be connected with as many tools as possible. This broadens its community and makes BibSonomy more valuable for its users. To conclude: If you are using BibSonomy and you are searching for an easy way to work with Word, then we can definitely recommend CiteSmart.

Feature of the Week: DOI Integration

We are still improving the integration of the Digital Object Identifier System (DOI), which tackles the problem of referencing, among others, digitally published scientific publications. As already described in a previous post, you can store a reference to such a publication by selecting its DOI with your mouse somewhere on some web page and applying one of our bookmarklets "post bookmark" or "post publication":

You can, of course, also enter a DOI in the post publication dialog or by providing accordingly formatted BibTeX fields as described a an other blog post. Publication references in BibSonomy containing DOIs can be easily identified in every resource list, as the corresponding entries contain a direct link to the referenced resource:


With our last release, we additionally added the DOI link to the details page of each publication containing a digital object identifier, allowing to easily navigate to a resource of interest:


Stay tuned to learn more about new features and background information - Happy Tagging!

.folke