Feature of the Week: Tag Box Settings

Some weeks ago we improved and unified the settings for the tag cloud. If you have JavaScript enabled you see now above your tag cloud the options for sorting (Which could be either by frequency (i.e., how often you used a tag) or alphabetically.), layout (You can choose between a cloud or a list.), and minimal frequency (Allows you to show only tags which you used at least that often.).

On the settings page all those options (and some more) can be changed, too. There you can also adjust the minimal tag frequency at a finer granularity and activate tooltips for your tags. For users with deactivated JavaScript the settings page is the preferred way to change the layout of their tag cloud.

Furthermore, if you are logged in the settings are now saved in the database. Hence, when you switch to another browser or computer, you see your tag cloud always in the same layout.

Feature of the week: A tagcloud for the ISWC + ASWC 2007

Next week, the 6th International Semantic Web Conference and the 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference are hosted in Busan, Korea. About 120 conference, workshop and doctoral papers will be presented and discussed. With the help of a RDF dump, publication metadata and hyperlinks are now available in BibSonomy.

The system contains all accepted papers, together with the keywords (tags) that authors have associated with their papers or that show up in the paper titles. To help conference participants finding interesting works, a web-frontend has been created which shows a tag cloud of the most important keywords. The color of each tag indicates the track to which most abstracts annotated with that tag belong to. Clicking on a tag (keyword) will retrieve from BibSonomy the abstracts that have been tagged with it.

While attending the conference, participants can further collect, annotate and share publications using BibSonomy. The "cool" stuff is presented when clicking on "See you what your collegues find cool". A specific search showing all publications of a searched author completes the retrieval facilities of BibSonomy.

The idea to enable publication sharing in conferences was started at the Statphys23 conference in 2007 under the umbrella of the Tagora project. The ISWC + ASWC tagcloud has been realized with support of Nepomuk.

Given the necessary BibTeX entries to store publication abstracts, metadata and associated keywords in BibSonomy, we can provide BibSonomy web front-ends presenting a conference's tag cloud and interests (cool stuff). With this initiative we hope to enhance and round up discussions and information sharing among research communities.

Beate

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: clouds

Looking out of the window, I can see the visible mass of condensed droplets or frozen crystals that are so typical for a German sky in autumn. Consistent to the weather, this week's feature is about clouds. In BibSonomy (and other collaborative tagging systems), clouds reflect the common vocabulary of the system's user. It's fun to occasionally viewing BibSonomy's cloud to get an overview of what other people liked. When hitting the cloud link, you may have realized some layout changes. Also, the computation of the tag cloud changed. We now exclude predefined tags such as imported, and only consider those tags that have been used by more than 10 different users. Small changes, which hopefully make a difference.

Beate

Feature of the week: TagCloud

Today we gonna present you the brand new TagCloud, implemented in the
newest BibSonomy release. While using BibSonomy your TagCloud grows bigger and bigger and easily becomes unattractive. To avoid this fact and additionally give you a better view about your most used tags, the new TagCloud will now be able to show only the top X tags of you. Where X can be set in your settings page and has an default value of 50 (Pic. 1).


Pic. 1: Your new TagCloud settings.

So this means instead of a 2-page long TagCloud, you will have a small and clear TagCloud containing your top tags (Pic. 2 & 3).
Of course you can still use the old TagCloud, if you feel fine with your current TagCloud behaviour and dont want to change it. The TagCloud can be set back to the old behaviour in your settings page by setting choice of tags to min Frequency.

Let's see it in action:

Old	New
Pic. 2: old TagCloud.	Pic. 3: new TagCloud.

Feature of the week: TagCloud

Today we are going to present you the brand new TagCloud, implemented in the newest BibSonomy release.
While using BibSonomy your TagCloud grows bigger and bigger and easily becomes unattractive.
To avoid this fact and additionally give you a better view about your most used tags, the new TagCloud will now be able to show only the top X tags of you.
Where X can be set in your settings page and has an default value of 50 (Pic. 1).




Pic. 1: Your new TagCloud settings.


So this means instead of a 2-page long TagCloud, you will have a small and clear TagCloud containing your top tags (Pic. 2 & 3).

Of course you can still use the old TagCloud, if you feel fine with your current TagCloud behaviour and dont want to change it. The TagCloud can be set back to the old behaviour in your settings page by setting choice of tags to min Frequency.


Let's see it in action:

[Feature of the Week] BibSonomy Forecast: Partly (tag)cloudy!

Since its beginning, BibSonomy has undergone several changes - layouts were modified (who of you can still recall the early style from 2005?), new functions were added, internal modules were restructured to enhance performance, and many more. However, throughout these times, the very core of BibSonomy remained the same - namely to be a system to collaboratively annotate (bookmark and publication) resources using freely chosen tags. Despite the fact that the "Web 2.0 hype" is declining since quite some time, the usefulness of free social annotations is reflected e.g. in the usage of tags to organize questions at stackoverflow. So to use a pointed formulation, one could say that tags and their aggregation into tag clouds are a bit like the "heart" of BibSonomy as a social bookmarking platform.

Taking a look back in this way, we decided to polish up our tag clouds a bit. Since the last release, you will have noticed a slight but noticeable change: We've tried to make our tag clouds a bit "cloudier" and nicer. Mainly we've fixed the way how tag sizes are computed (as usually, larger and more visible fonts correspond to more frequently used tags; but we're scaling differently to convey a clearer picture), and changed the alignment. Here is how it looked before:

And here's the new look:

As you can see, it's no revolution, but just a bit nicer and cleaner. But because tags are to close to BibSonomy's (and of course our) heart, we're happy about this neat improvement. We've basically done this for all clouds - this means also for personal or group tag clouds. So we hope you like the new style as much as we do, and you can be even a bit happier when tagging :)

Best,

Dominik