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

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.