Feature of the Week: BibSonomy Inside

As started in the last feature of the week we release this week additional information about BibSonomy which will help to integrate BibSonomy into other services like catalog systems of libraries. As discussed the former FOTW BibSonomy relies on different hash keys to find similar publications. The needed information to compute these keys is described here. The page includes a small demo and a java example implementation which is used in BibSonomy to compute the different hash keys. This implementation can be used to compute the same hash keys in other system. Together with the possibility to access the tag cloud of a publication by a hash via BibSonomy's API a nice integration and a community summary of a publication can be integrated into every system.

We think this is a first step for a tighter integration of Bibsonomy and libraries catalog systems or any other similar system.

Feature of the Week: Tags for Resources

If you're using the API and are interested in all tags users have assigned to a specific resource, you now have the possibility to get the tags by using the API-URL http://www.bibsonomy.org/api/tags with the parameter "resource=[hash]" (together with the parameter "resourcetype"). E.g., a request to /api/tags?resourcetype=bookmark&resource=64122a860e632f5ed0148740e25239e6 gives you all tags for the bookmark with the hash 64122a860e632f5ed0148740e25239e6. This allows you to include all tags related to a resource in your application.

Please note, that you have to use the interHash of a resource (as given in the XML output of the API) for this functionality. Further information can be found in the API documentation.

Note: When using hashes of BibTeX posts from the BibSonomy web interface links (e.g., /bibtex/295b16cdb7731d697234d355fc4e68fe3), one must be careful to pick the "correct" hash. In the links all intra-hashes currently have a "2" and all inter-hashes a "1" prepended and are thus 33 characters long (compare /bibtex/295b16cdb7731d697234d355fc4e68fe3/emanuel with /bibtex/1148dc0c64433f631174b5fc419597dd6). This is to distinguish several types of hashes in the web interface (the "old" intra-hashes which started with a "0" still work!). So when using a hash from the web interface, care must be taken that it is really an intra-hash (e.g., starts with a "2") and before querying the API the preceeding "2" must be removed.
We will shortly extend the API to also accept 33 characters long intra-hashes.

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.

BibSonomy backup client available

A golden rule when working with computers is to never forget a regular backup of important data. For the case of your data (BibTeX entries and bookmarks) stored in BibSonomy, we are investing a lot of effort (regular database backups, replication databases, ...) on the server side to prevent data loss in any form, so basically you can sleep sound while we take care of your backup strategy.

However, the most trustworthy backup remains still the one that I have done on my own and the one that is stored on a computer of my choice. To support you in this task, we are happy to present you our brand new backup tool: It is available for download here (check the latest versio of the file bibsonomy-userbackup.zip):

https://gforge.cs.uni-kassel.de/frs/?group_id=78


It is written in Java and is based on our API. It basically

• downloads all your Bibtex and bookmark data (or the public data of other users) to your computer
• saves all data in a zip file
• enables to restore the backed-up data from this zip file back into the BibSonomy account.

To test it out, follow these steps:

1. unzip the .jar-file contained in the downlodable file (see above)
2. if you do not yet have an API-key to access our API, you can obtain one here
3. start the application on the command line by typing java -jar bibsonomy-userbackup.jar (Java needs to be installed on your system at this point)
4. follow the instructions to back-up or restore your BibSonomy data

Please note that in the current status, all data is backed up except private PDF documents and private notes. We are working on including these as well, and we hope that the tool is already useful for you in its current status. If you have questions or comments, don't hesitate to contact us.

Best,
Dominik

Easteregg of the Week: BibSonomy Link on Websites

Some websites such as the German news magazine Spiegel provide a link or a button on their web pages so that a page’s visitor can easily store the page in a social bookmarking system. For example, the column Zwiebelfisch about the specialities of the German language shows a "Bookmark" link above the title. Providing such a link has several advantages for providers and users: on the one hand, being visible in a social bookmarking system can increase the popularity of the website, on the other hand users get the possibility to store interesting web resources at a central place.

The technique to include such a link or button on your website is simple and can be realized by including a small javascript into your html code. For people interested in offering such a link or button to store bookmarks in BibSonomy we now provide the javascript code on the following BibSonomy page. Just try it on your website or blog – it is really easy!

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

See the BibSonomy API in action with WizTools.org RESTClient 2.1

When developing RESTful applications or accessing such services, it can be of great help to have a handy tool to try out its different functionalities. A useful application to this end is the WizTools.org RESTClient. It provides a slim and convenient interface to test HTTP methods like POST, GET, DELETE or PUT, along with the possiblity to edit a variety of parameters for each request.

A tutorial to access our BibSonomy API with this tool is found here:

http://java.dzone.com/announcements/wiztoolsorg-restclient-21-rele

We think that this example demonstrates well both the capabilities of the RESTClient application and our API!

Best,
Dominik