Feature of the week: Discussed pages for groups

In a science group two important aspects of the work with literature are the processes of sharing it and of exchanging ideas and thoughts about it among the colleagues in your team. For the latter, we have introduced the discussion features last year.
With the last release we added a new page, that facilitates discussions within a group. Similar to the general discussed posts page and the discussed posts pages for single users, the new page displays the posts, discussed by members of a group.

It can be reached eiter

• using the URL: www.BibSonomy.org/discussed/group/ (e.g. www.BibSonomy.org/discussed/group/kde for the group kde) or
• via the group menu in the navigation bar:
  

The new page gives you an overview about what is going on in your group. It is especially useful in combination with the group privacy setting of discussion contributions (reviews and comments). The combination allows for a group-internal discussion in which the group's members can find out, what colleagues have read and especially, what colleagues liked and disliked.

Using the group discussions can be a real time saver. Before reading a new paper, simply check if someone in your group has not already read it and thus can tell you about it. On the other hand, you can use comments and reviews to tell your colleagues about great publications or warn them about bad ones.

If you are part of a research group, you might also want to take a look at our "usecase group discussion" in BibSonomy's help section.

Enjoy interesting discussions!
Stephan

Feature of the Week: Next Week's release

In the past weeks we were busy implementing BibSonomy's new look we announced in December. In this post we present a preview of the new layout you will experience from the next week on. Let's start with a screenshot of the start page for logged-in users:

As you can see: the general layout is the same: at the top the blue navigation and search bar, to the right the sidebar and to the left the bookmark and publication lists. The most obvious change are probably the new icons on the left of each post:

They show the type of the bookmarked publication, in this case a conference talk ("inproceedings"). In case you have uploaded a document to the post, its preview is shown on some pages (user and group pages). For bookmarks we plan to add screenshots (a student is already working on this). The yellow "sash" highlights your own posts. If you hover with the mouse over a post, it is highlighted by a yellow background and the new action icons appear that allow you to pick the post for the clipboard (formerly "basket"), edit, or delete it.

Actions you can do with all posts on the page are now all accessible at the top gear of each list:

Just hover with the mouse over the gear and you can access the options to export and sort your posts, pick or edit them. Another new menu can be found at the top of the sidebar:

This menu allows you to quickly access some unique features of BibSonomy. The first two icons guide you to your inbox and your clipboard (formerly "basket") and show how many posts they contain. With the next icon you can access your spheres, the edit tags page, your settings, this blog, and the help.

We hope that you will like the new layout and forgive us possible bugs that you will certainly find. Until then we try to decrease your chance of finding a bug by intensively testing the new layout.

Happy bookmarking!

Feature of the week: Workover of DIN1505 export format

As most of knowledge workers know, a crucial issue when working with scientific references is how to properly format them when creating bibliographies or publication lists. There's so many possibilities - title first, author first, year in brackets, ... and many more. As Germans typically tend to define some standards and norms in such a case, since 1984 there exists the DIN-1505-2 norm (link in German only), which precisely defines a legible standard citation format.

Experienced BibSonomy users will notice that we're offering this export format since quite a while - but in fact, this was a rather simplified variant. Since our last release, our team member Hagen (thanks again!) meticulously examined the DIN-norm and implemented it as a JabRef export layout. If you want to see it in action, choose the "export button" on top of any publication list:

and choose "DIN 1505" (for the plain layout) or "DIN1505, grouped by year" (for a display grouped by year):

Here are two examples of the layout in action:

• http://www.bibsonomy.org/layout/din1505/user/dbenz/myown?items=1000
• http://www.bibsonomy.org/layout/din1505year/user/dbenz/myown?items=1000

For those of you who are technically interested: The export layout consists of "typical" JabRef layout template files, along with a number of custom formatters written in Java. Both are publicly available via our Maven repository. We would be happy to get some feedback, if this filter is useful to you! In any case happy tagging & exporting,

Dominik

BibSonomy Release 2.0.23

BibSonomy now runs as version 2.0.23! This release contained a lot of clean-up with respect to the latest layout changes.

• The page is now completely scrollable again.
• Preview pictures of publications are only displayed on larger screens.
• The sidebar is no longer undisplayed on smaller screens to keep all navigation (tags, similar tags, discussion pages, etc.) available.

The non-scrollable version of BibSonomy might come back sometime as one of two or more options to choose from in your personal settings. Our efforts to redesign BibSonomy continue and we hope to see some results within the next months.

Next to these design-minded changes, the new release includes:

• An all new experimental feature: QR Codes for publications and a QR Code scanner on the clipboard.
• A first draft for referencing publications or bookmarks in discussions (reviews and comments (take a look).
• A first draft for posting publications by uploading a .pdf file.

Stay tuned for the next feature of the week posts to learn more about these new possibilities.

Happy tagging

Stephan

Feature of the week: Organize your publications with the help of QR Codes

Organizing your publications became easier with the help of BibSonomy. Now the workflow will even become more comfortable. We introduce a brand new experimental feature to help you putting together references with the help of QR Codes.

We implemented the possibility to automatically embed a QR Code containing the URL of the corresponding BibSonomy post into your uploaded documents which can be read and decoded by the new QR Code scanner inside the clipboard. Of course you can always choose to download your document with or without the QR Code.

After uploading a private copy of one of your collected publications you will recognize a new entry on the right side of the already familiar download link reading "including a QR Code":

The red box marks the link to click if you want BibSonomy to embed the QR Code into the copy of your document. The modified version is provided as a direct download - same as usual. 

The QR Code can be read by any QR Code reader. It contains the URL to the corresponding post. The new QR Code scanner on the clipboard page goes even further and immediately adds the corresponding post to your clipboard. Simply hold the QR code in front of your webcam such that the code appears in the designated area in the sidebar of the clipboard page.

After sucessfully decoding the QR-Code, you'll hear the "snap sound"  and the post that belongs to your publication will have been added to your clipboard.  

Workflow suggestion:

When writing a paper for your studies you search for related work and references. Create posts on BibSonomy to get a digital representation of your reference collection. Procede by printing these references with an embedded QR Code. Finally you can put together the papers you actually want to cite by scanning them with the QR Code scanner.

This gives you the opportunity to compile a sublist of your collection of publications in the blink of an eye without having to remember where the corresponding post is located.

We are currently working to make the feature even faster. Stay tuned for one of our next updates.

Happy Scanning

Philipp

PS: For the QR Code Scanner to work, you have to install the flash plugin on your system.

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

Discover Names

Today I'll introduce to you to one of our new projects at our research unit: The Nameling

The Nameling was developed in the need for finding a given name (which of course should be nice and enjoyable). It turned out that finding a nice name wasn't that difficult - but all names which we found pleasant, were also popular in our neighbourhood. Being busy at work with mining patterns in huge data sets, the idea for mining pleasant names was born.

Currently, the Nameling implements a similarity search for given names, based on co-occurrences in the English and German version of Wikipedia (as a hidden feature, you can also access similarities emerging from the French version). This allows you, for example, to browse for names which fit to a name you like. Whenever possible, we also extracted corresponding categories for names from Wikipedia, allowing you to browse through all names within a given category:

By clicking on the lovely butterfly, you can add names to your list of favourite names. You can also share your favourites with some of your friends, for collaboratively searching for your "best fit":

The Nameling gives you also access to further background information (at least a link to a corresponding Wikipedia article, if available). This comprises popularity rankings obtained from Wikipedia and Twitter, distribution of names over time as extracted from person data in Wikipedia and co-occurrences displayed as a graph whose nodes you can expand by a mouse click for navigating within the co-occurrence network.

Of course: We are a research unit and we want to go further. The Nameling currently implements a first and simple measure of similarity. We will make use of the Nameling's query logs to improve rankings and similarities. We will look for emerging patterns and correlations between user profile information and name preferences. The Nameling is still a very young project and surely needs improvements - but it already yields some astonishing results. Try it out yourself!

Happy browsing!
.folke