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.

Feature of the week: New system tag enables you to filter publications by their entry type

I am glad to present to you a new way to filter publications within a BibSonomy search. As you may already know publications can be classified by their type - there are books, articles, proceedings, etc. BibSonomy currently supports 12 types of publications:

• article
• book
• booklet
• inbook
• incollection
• inproceedings
• mastersthesis
• misc
• phdthesis
• proceedings
• techreport
• unpublished

When adding a publication to your BibSonomy account manually, the first thing to decide is what type of entry it is. No fixed classification scheme can be complete, but BibTeX provides enough entry types to handle almost any reference reasonably well.

With our new feature of the week we introduce a new system tag, that filters publications
by their entry type. The general structure of this tag is as follows:

sys:entrytype:type

The variable type can be one of the elements listed above, so that the whole tag might be for example sys:entrytype:masterthesis.

This enables you to create your own publication lists for your website ordered by entry types. If you are not familiar with this, you can find helpful instructions here.

Feature of the week: The new System Tag sys:title:tag allows for partial Search

Today we introduce a small new feature which will hopefully be useful for you as our user. In one of the last releases we introduced the new system tag sys:title:tag.

As one can guess from the name of the system tag, it can be used to search for a word (only one word) in the title field of publications. An example search for the word "Restful" is http://www.bibsonomy.org/tag/sys:title:Restful. Searching for two words is possible as well by using the system tag twice. As you can see from the URL the search is made over the entire database. The system tag can be used in the user environment, too. Again we look for "Restful" but in this case for the user hotho: http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/hotho/sys:title:Restful. This two search request are not really novel but for the system tag we added the possibility to use the wildcard *. By adding * at the end of a word or even of a part of a word a search for the beginning is made. An example could be the search "Rest*" in the collection of the user hotho http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/hotho/sys:title:Rest* and it works for the entire database as well.

For interested users: To make this feature available we setup a special index in the search part of our system. Lucene is the basis of our search engine framework which is very fast for search engine like queries and allows for partially search requests, too. With the help of the system tag we redirect the request to the corresponding index. We use the system tag internally for other features like the auto completion but this will be the topic of one of the next features of the
week. In the near future we will be able to offer more system tags as we are currently working on a new framework for such tags.

Feature of the week: Organizing a Research Group's Literature Suggestions

Last week we received an e-mail from a user asking the following question:

For our scientific society we would like to allow its members to make suggestions for literature that should be added to the society's database. The group members could use BibSonomy to add suggestions easily using BibSonomy's browser add-on. This works only if suggestions can be easily added. Is this possible with the browser add-on or does it require an additional step?

Our answer reads as following:
In principle, there are two mechanisms to achieve your goal. Both are triggered by system tags:

1. Members of your group can use the tag for:GROUPNAME to copy a post directly "into" the group, i.e., the copy is afterwards owned by the user that owns/constitutes the group.
2. Members of your group can use the tag send:GROUPNAME to copy a post into the group's inbox. There, the group user can add the post to the group's collection or ignore it (i.e., delete it from the inbox).

Option 1) works only "in the direction" of the group user (i.e., group members can copy posts into the group's collection), option 2) works also between group members and between friends.
Another option would be to just agree upon a specific tag and then all group members annotate relevant posts with that tag. You can access those posts then at http://www.bibsonomy.org/group/GROUPNAME/TAG.

Happy Tagging!

Feature of the week: System Tags

In BibSonomy there exist a few special tags, so called system tags, which expand its functionality. Today I'd like to give a short overview. Information on (system) tags can also be found on our help pages.

System tags can be grouped into two categories:

Tags that can be added to a post 

• for:<groupname> copies a post to a group's collection with the tag replaced by from:YourUserName. The copied post will remain unaltered if you change or delete your own post. You must be a member of the group you forward the post to.
• myown: adds the post to your CV page.
• send:<username> sends a post to the inbox of another BibSonomy user. To use this tag, the receiver must have added you to his BibSonomy friends list or you and the receiver must have at least one group in common.
• sys:hidden:<tag> hides a tag from every user besides yourself. 
• sys:relevantFor:<groupname> adds a post to the relevantFor-page of the a group. This tag has the same effect as selecting a group in the "relevant for"-box while editing the post.

Tags that can be used as a filter for search queries 

• sys:author:<authorname> filters the search range by author.
• sys:bibtexkey:<bibtexkey> filters the search range by bibtexkey.
• sys:entrytype:<entrytype> filters the search range by entry type.
• sys:group:<group> filters the search range by group.
• sys:not:<tag> excludes entries with tag <tag>. Here you can also use wildcards, e.g. sys:not:news_* excludes all posts with tags that start with "news_". See our earlier blog post for more information.
• sys:title:<title> filters the search range by title.
• sys:user:<user> filters the search range by user.
• sys:year:<year> filters the search by year of the publication. Several arguments are possible, e.g.:
• 2000: all posts of the year 2000
• 2000-: all posts from the year 2000 or from one of the following years
• -2000: all posts from the year 2000 or from an earlier year
• 1990-2000: all posts from the years 1990 to 2000

I hope this overview will help to improve your experience with BibSonomy. 

Happy Tagging!
Lena