Feature of the week: status update

Sorry for the sparseness of our "features of the week", we were traveling, on holiday and implementing new features. We will describe new features in the next weeks in more detail. I will give you a short overview today:

• Links to documents attached to publication posts are now included in the API's XML (including the MD5 hash of the file!).
• BibSonomy now supports OpenID.
• A new popular page and an updated tag page.
• Logging of click events in the web interface. This is for research purposes, e.g. to better evaluate tag recommenders. You can disable this on the settings page.
• We're currently working on an open tag recommendation interface to allow interested researchers to evaluate their recommenders right inside BibSonomy.
• We will shortly make the code of our scrapers publicly available and since today provide a simple web service which allows to use the scrapers independent of BibSonomy.
• A new version of the Java client library is available. We also published the corresponding JavaDoc.
• And last but not least: numerous bugfixes went into the new releases.

So we're looking forward for the next weeks to explain new or updated features and also to new features we will release shortly. There are some interesting things in the pipeline!

Metadata Scraping Service

As mentioned in Robert's last blog post we set up a scraping service which supports users working with citations by extracting automatically references from digital library or publisher websites. We use a very similar service in BibSonomy to support our users while posting a new reference. However, the service is independent from BibSonomy. Our main goal is to make the metadata of other websites easily accessible to every user who needs bibliographic metadata. Therefore we offer the extracted information in BibTeX format. Most tools allow to import BibTeX so it should be very easy for everyone to get the data into his own tool. The service is running under the following URL:

http://scraper.bibsonomy.org/

Currently we support more than 60 different websites (here the full list) and we are working on further extensions. In the near future we will make the source code of our scrapers publicly available under GPL and we hope that other people will find it useful and start to help us by implementing their own scrapers.

How does the service work?

In principle there are two ways to use the service. One uses a so
called bookmarklet and the other is simply based on the URL. If you
have a webpage of a supported site e.g. from ACM digital library the
following page:

Logsonomy - social information retrieval with logdata

then you can copy this URL into the form on the service homepage and the service will return you the extracted BibTeX information. As this is not a very convenient way to access the data we provide a ScrapePublication button. This button is a small piece of JavaScript and can be copied to the toolbar of the browser. By pressing this button while visiting a digital library webpage the URL will be automatically copied and sent to the scraping service and the metadata is extracted.

The service has three options which can be used to customize it and to make it useful for other systems. Obviously one parameter is the URL itself which is used by the bookmarklet, too. The next is the selection parameter which allows to send text to the service and the last parameter allows to change the output format from html to plain BibTeX. This last parameter makes integration with other systems very simple.

If needed we can provide the metadata in other formats as well but currently we support only BibTeX.

Feature of the week: maven repository

First, to all of our users a happy new year 2009!

This year will bring us new projects centered around BibSonomy and we hope to make the system much more useable. Today we're opening a part of the BibSonomy source code, so it's a post for all developers interested in BibSonomy.

A public maven repository is available on dev.bibsonomy.org - our new developer page. Currently, the following modules are available:

• bibsonomy-model
  The classes defining the data structures BibSonomy is working on. In particular, all objects one operates on using the REST client API are defined by those classes.
• bibsonomy-common
  Most enums, exceptions, and utility functions are contained in this module.
• bibsonomy-rest-common
  Common things needed by both the REST server and the REST client, in particular enums, exceptions, and the XML renderer.
• bibsonomy-rest-client
  The REST client API. Everybody who's programming Java and wants to use BibSonomy's API should have a look at this module.
• bibsonomy-bibtex-parser
  The thing which parses every incoming publication reference. Really an important part of the system. It's based on javabib from Johannes Henkel. Kudos to Johannes!
• bibsonomy-scraper
  Here they are: all the scrapers which allow us to import publication references from more than 60 digital libraries.
• bibsonomy-scrapingservice
  The stand alone scraping service.

All code is released under GPL or even LGPL licenses. We will soon provide updates on a regular basis. For bug reports we suggest to use the issue tracker at our collaborative development environment.

We would be very pleased to get some feedback and hope to stimulate some further external development around BibSonomy. Have fun playing around with the code and let us know what you've done with it.

Feature of the week: OpenID support in BibSonomy

OpenID is an open, decentralized standard, which allows users to log onto many different services on the web using the same identity identification (single sign-on). This kind of authentication is provided by a growing number of websites, including large ones like AOL, Google, Microsoft, MySpace, Yahoo and many others. And now for the good news - we are happy to announce that BibSonomy is among those!

OpenID makes registering at BibSonomy a lot easier. If you already haven an OpenID, you can go directly to our register page and click the link "register using OpenID" at the bottom:
In the next step, you enter your OpenID:
Then, you will have to confirm your BibSonomy registration at your OpenID-Provider (in this example myopenid). When you trust BibSonomy, you should activate the checkbox "Skip this step next time I sign in to www.bibsonomy.org" - then you won't be redirected to your OpenID provider the next times you log in to BibSonomy:

And finally you can complete your user settings. Please note that your name, gender and other information is fetched from the OpenID-server, so you don't have to retype all those details each time your register:
The next time you want to log in to BibSonomy, you can do this by clicking the link "Login with OpenID" at the bottom of our login page.

If you do not know your OpenID, it might nevertheless be the case that you already have one, e.g. when you have a Flickr account - refer to the official OpenID page to find out more details on this. Please note that OpenID will On the same site you will find information how to obtain a brand new OpenID, which can then then make your online experience easier and better - including BibSonomy!

Best,
Dominik

Feature of the week: Bibsonomy's new Layout

As you probably already noticed: BibSonomy got a new outfit. We will summarize how look & feel of your (still) blue social bookmark and publication sharing system has changed.

Navigation
Little changed with respect to BibSonomy's menu navigation, though, due to extensive use of cascading style sheets (CSS), overall navigation is more consistent and obvious in comparison with the old layout.

Whenever a menu item is linked to a sub menu, a downward triangle is displayed left to the corresponding item. The main menu realizes tab-like navigation: While visiting a certain page, the corresponding menu item is displayed in the front.


Tag clouds
The picture above also shows the new tag cloud representation: The higher a tag's frequency, the bigger its font size and more intense its color.


List views
Each list view which shows publications as well as bookmarks offers the possibility to expand one of it's columns. This feature can be found on the top right:

Double column view is restored by activating the '|' link at the same place.

Quick-Post
You can tag any post displayed by your own by clicking on the star on the right of the corresponding entry in a list view. A solid blue star indicates that you already tagged the resource.


Internationalization
Internationalization of BibSonomy is still in progress. Whenever available, different languages can be chosen by clicking on the corresponding flag at the top right corner.



...and all the rest
Not each element's new layout has been introduced here (e.g. the new groups listing, just to mention one). Have a look by yourself and enjoy BibSonomy's new layout.

Errors tend to happen, though we try our best to avoid them. If you encounter any incorrectly rendered elements, please let us now by sending an email (see our contact page for further details).


.folke

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: Zotero and BibSonomy integration

Zotero helps you to collect, manage and cite publications. In contrast to BibSonomy, Zotero is a Firefox extension, which can be used in one's web browser. Since the last release of BibSonomy, we support exporting citation information from BibSonomy to Zotero.

When Zotero senses items on a web page, it adds an icon in the Firefox's location bar. A user can click on the icon and Zotero saves the reference information in one of the user's libraries. BibSonomy now offers the icon for Zotero users. The icon is shown on pages with BibTeX entries.


By clicking on this icon, a pop up allows you to select the entries you want to export. Click OK and the selected references will appear in your Zotero library.



The other way around is not fully automized yet. However, there is a nice blog entry which shows how to easily copy and paste Zotero data into a BibSonomy "postPublication" snippet.

Translated from this tutorial: Navigate to Zotero's settings-tabs and select the export tab. Push the plus button below the "Site Specific Settings" area to add a new setting. In the new pop up, enter "bibsonomy.org" and select "BibTeX" as output format. You can confirm your new entry by clicking on OK.



When you log in to BibSonomy and click on "postPublication", you can drag and drop a Zotero entry into the box below "Insert your publication snippet here". Enter save and the BibTex entry will be displayed in the appropriate fields.