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: Complete your spheres with recommended users

Although many people usually spend a lot of time at work, most of our lives are probably not centered around a single topic or activity. This is typically reflected in different kinds of people we interact with. Since some time, BibSonomy supports the sharing of resources within different communities via "Spheres" - see Folke's explanation for a brief introduction.

While the composition of some spheres (like e.g. your colleagues at work) is quite straightforward and will not change too frequently, others are somewhat more "lively" - imagine as an example a sphere comprising other researchers working on a similar topic like yourself. In such a case, it is always useful to keep an eye on what is going on, and add potentially interesting users from time to time.

In order to make this easier, we've added "recommended users" to the spheres page (For our power users: This feature will probably remind you of our "similar users".). When logged in, you can find other BibSonomy users which we think might be interesting for you on the top right corner of the sidebar on the spheres page:

Hereby we are computing the similar users mainly based on tag usage - i.e., if other people in the system frequently use similar tags like yourself, we expect that you both share a common interest. Because several similarity measures are hereby thinkable, we've added the possibiliy to choose among them - when you click on the "more" link (see red arrow), you can inspect different recommendations, created by the following metrics:

• FolkRank
• Jaccard Index
• Cosine Similarity
• Cosine Similariy, weighted by Tf/Idf

Although there is an overlap, we expect that the different metrics could be individually useful for finding different kinds of relevant users - empirical studies to this end are part of our research work. In any case, we hope this feature helps you in building great spheres, and finally getting the most out of BibSonomy!

Happy Tagging,

Dominik