BibSonomy Blog

Feature of the Week: New version of JabRef-plugin released!

2009-11-12T11:12:00.010+01:00

As you will have noticed, we are maintaining a plugin for the open-source bibliography manager JabRef, which allows to easily download and upload entries from BibSonomy. We believe that this approach nicely combines the advantages of maintaining a local BibTeX-file with the comfort and usefulness of a centralized publication sharing platform like BibSonomy.

We have just now released a new version of this plugin, which offers some nice features to ease the maintenance of both collections (local + within BibSonomy)! Check it out:

Added document management: In JabRef and within BibSonomy, it is possible to attach a private copy (PDF, PS, ...) to a publication entry. The new version of our plugin allows to download all your private documents present in BibSonomy by a single click (first image). Furthermore, you can control in the settings menu that local documents are automatically uploaded to BibSonomy when you storethe publication (second image).

Automatic Synchronization: A typical problem is to keep both collections (your local .bib file and your BibSonomy account) synchronized. We are proud to offer a comfortable feature to automatically perform this task (third image on the right). This feature automatically checks for entries present in both collections if they are equal; if there is a difference, you can decide which version to keep. A 'diff-like' view helps you to see what has changed (4th image on the right).

Full-text search: In prior versions, it was only possible to retrieve posts from BibSonomy by tag. Now you can also perform a full-text search in your personal or in the global collection.
Further small additions & bugfixes: Apart from the above-mentioned new features, we improved the interface, fixed some bugs, and generally made the plugin more stable and better :)

You can download the latest version of the plugin here: The updated documentation can be accessed via http://www.bibsonomy.org/help/doc/jabref-plugin/index.html. We hope this new release helps you to be more efficient in your personal and shared publication managent - we are as usual always happy about feedback, comments, suggestions!!

Best,
Dominik

Main Server Crashed

2009-10-06T21:10:00.002+02:00

Today we had a crash of our main machine. It took us 1 hour to restart everything as it was late and no one was in the office. This was the reason BibSonomy was not available. Unfortunately this is the third time within 4 weeks that the machine crashed. We are now searching for the reason but currently we have no clue as we did not observe any special situation. It seem to be some strange hardware defect. Lets cross the finger that we can figure out the problem soon.

New Release

2009-09-28T17:06:00.000+02:00

Those of you which have recently tried to delete a post probably have noticed a small but helpful change: a dialog box is now asking you for confirmation. If you accidentally clicked on the "delete" link, you have now the chance to stop the process. If you don't like this feature: just disable it on the settings page and you get back the old behaviour.

This is just one of the changes the new release contains but obviously the most noticeable one. Furthermore, we updated the code to import bookmarks from Delicious and Firefox, to upload JabRef layouts and to pick/unpick posts for the basket. Several smaller bugfixes also made it into the release.

As always a small sidenote: although we tested the code, it might contain bugs we did not find. So if you think you've found an error, don't hesitate to contact us!

Tagging for Championship

2009-09-08T15:21:00.011+02:00

As a social bookmarking system, assigning tags to resources is one of BibSonomy's most important and frequent processes. Since a while, the user is assisted by a set of recommended tags as shown in Figure 1.

The Challenge

Recommender systems are subject to active research and different approaches emerged. In the context of this year's ECML PKDD Discovery Challenge, BibSonomy's tag recommendations were provided by 14 different recommender systems from 10 different research teams in 7 different countries during the last five weeks. The challenge consisted of three tasks where the first two tasks were dealing with fixed datasets obtained from BibSonomy, while the third task's subject was to provide tag recommendations to the user in the running system.

Yesterday, during the ECML PKDD Discovery Challenge Workshop, the challenge's participants presented their recommender systems and discussed the different approaches, still ignorant of the third task's winning team, which finally was announced in the evening during the conference's opening session.

Rating the Systems

Algorithms for tag recommendations are typically evaluated by computing some performance measure in an "off-line" setting, that is, by iterating over posts in a dataset, which was derived from a social bookmarking system, presenting only a user and a resource to the recommender system. Thus, for each post, the set of suggested tags can be compared with those the user had assigned. Participants in Task 1 and Task 2 were evaluated in such a setting.

But these "off-line" settings not only ignore some constraints in real live applications (e.g. cpu usage and memory consumption), they also can't take into account the effect of presenting a set of recommended tags to the user. To evaluate these effects, we set up Task 3, were recommender systems were integrated into BibSonomy and the recommender systems had to deliver their tag recommendations within a timeout of 1000 ms.

For evaluating the different recommender systems (in the off-line settings as well as Task 3), we calculated precision and recall for each system. While precision measures, how many recommended tags where adequate, recall takes into account, how many of the tags the user actually assigned to the resource where recommended.

Figure 2 shows the final results of the on-line challenge (which is available here). For each recommender system, we calculated precision and recall, considering only the first n tags (for n=1,2,..., 5) and averaged over all posts. The top blue graph for example shows, that from the corresponding recommender system's five recommended tags (the very right point) around 18% were chosen by the user (precision 0.18) and around 23% of the tags which the user finally assigned to the resource were "predicted" by the recommender.

The winning teams are:

Task 1: Marek Lipczak, Yeming Hu, Yael Kollet, and Evangelos Milios (Paper)

Task 2: Steffen Rendle and Lars Schmidt-Thieme (Paper)

Task 3: Marek Lipczak, Yeming Hu, Yael Kollet, and Evangelos Milios (Paper)

We are happy to say, that it was an interesting challenge which gave substantial insight into the performance of different approaches to the task of tag recommendation. We'd like to thank everybody who contributed to this challenge - last but not least each of BibSonomy's users.

PUMA - Project on Academic Publication Management started on August 1st

2009-08-26T15:05:00.005+02:00

BibSonomy technology will be used in a project that fosters the open access movement and a better support of the researchers publications work. The project "PUMA - Academic Publication Management" is funded by the German Research Foundation DFG and has been started on August 1st, 2009. PUMA is a joint project of the University Library and the Knowledge & Data Engineering Group of the University of Kassel.

Open access is a publication model that allows authors to publish their articles free of charge, and users to freely access them. The costs are borne by the institution that is providing the institutional repository. There are several reasons for this publication model. With reduced budgets and increased costs for journals, many university libraries cannot afford the subscription of all relevant journals any longer. Furthermore, open access supports a timely publication and broader visibility of articles so that research results can be taken up earlier and by more researchers, decreasing thus the turn around time of scientific results.

Even though many researchers support the open access movement in principle, they often do not contribute their publications to the institutional repository of their university. Key reasons are that they do not see an immediate benefit from this additional effort, and that the upload is not integrated in their usual work flow. PUMA aims therefore for an integrated solution, where the upload of a publication results automatically in an update of both the personal and institutional homepage, the creation of an entry in BibSonomy, an entry in the academic reporting system of the university, and its publication in the institutional repository. At the time of upload, meta data from several data sources (SHERPA/RoMEO list, online library catalogue, BibSonomy) will be collected automatically in order to support the user. Further, PUMA aims to provide a publication management platform for all researchers and students to be used on a daily basis, which reduces not only the open access publication effort but also the effort to manage one's own publications.

The PUMA platform will be based on BibSonomy technology and will be hosted by the University Library; it will be setup in a Web 2.0 style. The platform will include all features known from BibSonomy, like tagging of publications, easy usage, an API and scalability. BibSonomy will continue to be run by the Knowledge & Data Engineering Group. As a showcase, PUMA will be integrated with the open access repository platform DSpace, the libary system PICA, the Typo3 content management system, and BibSonomy. The system is open for adaption to other standard systems. The project results will be published as open source software. This implies that the complete BibSonomy source code will become available under an open source licence at the end of the project.

Feature of the week: Stay tuned to interesting content by following interesting users

2009-07-24T17:09:00.005+02:00

A good starting point when searching for interesting resources in BibSonomy are other users with similar interests. In a prior post, we showed how BibSonomy can help you to discover these similar users. We're now happy to announce a new feature which makes it easy for you to keep track of interesting resources of these people - you can now just follow them!

The basic idea is like this: Once you stumble upon a user who seems to be interesting, you can use the follow-link on his user page to add him to your list of followed users. Think of this list as a buddy list of people with similar interests as you have. Here are two examples where you can find this link (on the user page and on the personalized user page):

On the followers page, you find then a list of all users you are following (and all users following you :) ). This page summarizes all recent posts of all users you are following, ranked personally for you. So the most relevant posts to you are shown at the top of the resource lists (we compute relevancy based on the tags you use). Here is what this page looks like:
You can also add and remove users from your list of followed users on this page. In addition, you can change some settings of the applied ranking algorithm and see which method is best in finding the most relevant posts for you.

Feel free to play around with this feature - we hope it can help you to "dig" through the resources of users with similar interests and finally find some pretty cool and relevant stuff for you!

Best,
Dominik

Feature of the week: "relevant for"

2009-06-24T14:38:00.006+02:00

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.

New Features released: Similar users + Personalization

2009-05-29T17:13:00.006+02:00

Today we've performed a release of BibSonomy, containing some new interesting features you might find helpful! The first one addresses the common problem of finding other BibSonomy users with similar interests as oneself; they might be a great source for interesting content like recent publications or up-to-date bookmarks. On your personal user page (i.e. in the "MyBibSonomy" area), you'll find in the sidebar a new list with "similar users":
We've computed these using several similarity measures - when you click on "more", you can check which one is best for you. When you click on one of the user names, you'll be directed to a personalized page which looks like this:
The main idea behind this personalization is to help you finding the interesting content of this user for you; we're comuting a personalized ranking which sorts this user's posts according to your interests. The tag cloud shows this user's tags, which are probably interesting for you.

This personalization feature is also available when you browse in the "usual way" on a user page - there we provide a "personalize"-Link at the top:
Besides that, this release contains a number of small fixes & improvements - if you happen to encounter any irregularity, we'd be happy to hear from you so that we can fix the problem. Besides that - feel invited to play around with our new features and get the most out of BibSonomy!

Best,
Dominik

Typo3 Extension for BibSonomy available

2009-05-26T09:19:00.003+02:00

Typo3 is a popular open-source content management system, used by a large number of private and corporate websites. It offfers among others a generic extension architecture, which enables developers to add custom functionality to Typo3-based websites.

For many websites in academic contexts (e.g. personal homepages of researchers, universities, research projects, ...), an important building block is an up-to-date publication list. Maintaining these lists manually is a tedious task; in order to ease this process, we have developed a versatile BibSonomy Typo3 Extension! The core concept is to keep all references cleanly stored inside BibSonomy (leveraging all useful BibSonomy features like import from different formats, scraping services, ...) and to generate automatically a publication list from this data. Have a look here what it can look like:

http://cms.uni-kassel.de/unicms/index.php?id=iteg_publikationen0

In order to set up such a nice publication list with the BibSonomy Typo3 plugin, you need to follow these simple steps:

Store the relevant publications in BibSonomy
Install the BibSonomy Typo3-Plugin in your Typo3 installation (Download it from here)
Configure the plugin (e.g. select which entries to display, select the layout, ...)
You're done! :)

For each of these steps we have written an extensive online documentation. Our plugin is already part of the official Typo3 installation of the University of Kassel! We offer a number of predefined standard layouts (Harvard, DIN1505...) for formatting the publication lists; in addition, it is possible to use customized layouts based on a JabRef Layout Filter.

Apart from publication lists, the plugin is also able to display tag clouds which can be embedded into websites to visualize e.g. research interests of a group or an individual. We hope that this plugin is another step towards making BibSonomy more useful for you in the process of managing bibliographic data in an integrated and unified way. The BibSonomy team is of course also open to comments and suggestions!

Best,
Dominik

FOW: Publication details

2009-04-09T16:27:00.006+02:00

Before leaving for a bycicle trip along the Weser river :-), I'd like to point your attention to a recent change in the presentation of a user's publication details.

Different features were included to make the metadata more representable. At the page's beginning, users can select different citation formats (e.g. Harvard, DIN1505) to represent the reference.

The next sections have only slightly changed. You can enter a link to the publication's provider, or upload a private copy of the document in question in the Resources section. The Abstract and Private Note section allow you to store informational and personal information. Finally, metadata can be changed or enhanced in the BibTex and Endnote record fields.

The sidebar gives the option to edit your tags. Additionally, tags that have been associated with this publication are shown. Those tags, that have been added by yourself, are underlined. To find out who else is interested in this publication, have a look at the related users.

If you wish to include a specific citation style, miss an important feature related to your publication metadata or have a brilliant idea how to further organise this page,
please contact us.

Happy easter!

Beate

Feature of the Week: New Color Scheme

2009-04-01T10:01:00.003+02:00

As users keep complaining about BibSonomy's choice of color, we decided to switch to our new neutral color theme.

Using statistics, datamining techniques and linear optimization, we determined a set of colors which minimizes the number of mails concerning BibSonomy's design. The resulting color set is dominated by a pleasing grey, which should fit everybody's needs.

Due to acquired habits, we continue to call BibSonomy the 'blue social bookmark and publication sharing system'.

Folke

FOW: You better save this as publication...

2009-03-27T16:32:00.007+01:00

Since Andreas' blog post you already know BibSonomy's scraping service which enables BibSonomy to automatically extract publication meta data from some websites.

For some time past this service also checks whether a user posts a bookmark pointing to a scrapable site, in which case the user is given an according hint:
We now extended this feature such that text, selected by the user prior hitting the 'postBookmark' button, is also checked. Thus, if you select BibTeX and press "postBookmark" or a DOI it might happen, that you get a notice, that you better save this as publication and not as bookmark.

You might try it out yourself right now by selecting one of these text snippets and pressing "postBookmark":

10.1007/978-3-540-73681-3_21
ISBN-13: 978-0201485417

CiteSmart

2009-03-25T16:15:00.011+01:00

Last year in November we were contacted by Mounir Errami, the project leader of MireSoft. He suggested a partnership with us. MireSoft has a product called CiteSmart, which is a citation software. It nicely integrates with Word and builds a bridge between web-based tools like BibSonomy or Connotea. It is easing the way to takeover the data from web application and it is able to produces references in various formats for articles written in Word. In this way, it allows to easily write scientific articles and supports the scientific work of researchers. Here is a screenshot:

We support this partnership as we think that BibSonomy needs to be connected with as many tools as possible. This broadens its community and makes BibSonomy more valuable for its users. To conclude: If you are using BibSonomy and you are searching for an easy way to work with Word, then we can definitely recommend CiteSmart.

New Release

2009-03-20T11:39:00.002+01:00

We've just released a new version of BibSonomy which fixes several bugs and introduces new features.

A short overview on the fixed bugs:

The restriction to a certain user or certain years on author pages was broken, i.e., /publ/author/Jäschke/sys:year:2008+sys:user:jaeschke delivered no results. This works again, now.
Please note that to get the page sorted by year you will need to add an additional parameter "sortPage=year" and if you want to have the latest articles on top additionally the parameter "sortPageOrder=desc". This is a new feature which allows to sort the posts on a page on (almost) any BibTeX fields. You can even combine fields using "|" as delimiter, such that posts having the same year are sorted by author name.

The BibTeX field "abstract" was exported as "bibtexAbstract" in some cases. This caused some tools which use this field to break. Now the abstract is again contained in the field "abstract". Note: in the API XML this field is still named "bibtexAbstract". We will see how we can fix this in the future (though it's not really a bug there).

New features include:

The bookmark posting dialog is all new. It's bilingual, supports reloading of recommendations, automatically fetches title or description, and has a new interface to select for which groups the post is viewable. The old buttons (should!) still work, though.

Members of groups can now mark a bookmark post to be "relevant for" the group.

Besides querying the tags for a page only using /tags/, now you can also get the related tags only using /relatedtags/. This is particular useful for the JSON output (e.g., see /json/relatedtags/user/jaeschke/folksonomy and /json/tags/user/jaeschke/folksonomy).

The publication details page (e.g., /bibtex/25ccf05a86e7f1a089ae83dd47568e6de/dbenz) is all new!

Some of the changes improve working with BibSonomy a lot and we will continue to transfer pages to the new backend. If you have found bugs or suggestions regarding the new pages, please let us know!
We will introduce the new features in more detail with the upcoming features of the week.

FOW: Fighting against the memory leak

2009-03-13T12:23:00.005+01:00

Todays feature of the week is a bit more technical. As you might know BibSonomy is based on a MySQL/Tomcat architecture. Usually BibSonomy is running very stable but from time to time the Java virtual machine stops with an "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space" error. This mostly happens after a redeploy of the BibSonomy project on the Tomcat. Why does this happens? The simple answer is: Because the Java VM does not have enough memory for the so called permanent generation space. This space is used to hold the Java classes in main memory. A simple solution is to give the JVM more PermGen space. But this does not solve the underlying problem. Usually the JVM has enough PermGen space. The only result from giving more memory is: the error will happen a bit later and not directly after the redeploy.

So we decided to search for the cause of the memory leak. Soon we found out, that there were some classes from the web application which the classloader could not remove from the PermGen space because they were "linked" to classes which were loaded by the standard classloader. There could be several causes for that and using the right tools (jmap and jhat from the JDK) plus some small programm to find reference chains we found the culprits:

* MySQL Connector/J (see http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=36565)
* iBatis (see https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/IBATIS-540)
* JabRef
* Tomcat (see https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=46221)
* and some we could fix by just moving some JARs to the right places (see also here and here).

Identifying the subjects was an iterative task - fixing one leak caused appearing the next one ... We did not know that there were so many candidates at the beginning. We could fix iBatis by switching to a newer version, MySQL, JabRef and Tomcat were a little harder to fix.
For JabRef we had to modify the source code such that it does not start AWT. Additionally, a Tomcat LifecycleListener kills the java.util.prefs.FileSystemPreferences after webapp shutdown using awful Java introspection hacks:


 final Class clazz = CleanupListener.class.getClassLoader().loadClass("java.util.prefs.FileSystemPreferences");
 final Field f = clazz.getDeclaredField("syncTimer");
 f.setAccessible(true);
 final Timer timer = (Timer) f.get(null);
 timer.cancel();

To fix the MySQL bug, the listener ensures on the startup of the web application that the MySQL connection class is loaded before the web app and by the standard classloader, such that the cancellation timer threads (which is the cause of the leak) don't block unloading of the webapp. The loggers from the StandardContext in Tomcat (which are loaded via the webapps classloader - for whatever reason) are also killed by the listener.

After several weeks of work we have a leak free application. The bad thing is that every library we are using can bring back a leak and if we are not careful the leak will be back quicker as we like. Unfortunately we are not aware of a method which we could put into the Tomcat or into our application which just checks for memory leaks.

Hope you found this interesting and good luck with your own applications ...

New BibSonomy release online

2009-02-24T09:05:00.003+01:00

In this blog, we usually announce new features of BibSonomy, as we're working steadily on improving our service. Some improvements are more visible, others not so much - e.g. when we optimize things in the code or server infrastructure. The latter is what we have been concerned with in the last weeks - we've continued to migrate old parts of the code into our new web application framework, fixed bugs, refactored some parts of the code, and so on.

Yesterday (Monday, 23rd of Feb 2009) we've released a major part of these "background improvements" - in the optimal case, you actually shouldn't notice a lot of it (except that our service has become faster and more reliable). But as we as developers usually become a bit "system-blind", we'd be grateful for any kind of feedback in case you encounter anomalies or irregularities during your daily work with bibsonomy.org.

More specifically, the following pages / functionalities were touched during the release:

Basket (http://www.bibsonomy.org/basket)
Layout filters (e.g, http://www.bibsonomy.org/layout/din1505/)
BibTex Detail pages (e.g, http://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/2862a7a0fab09d8ee50adbd9c4bdb064d)
in-place editing of tags
deletion of user accounts (via settings page)
JSON-output (e.g. http://www.bibsonomy.org/json/user/dbenz)
XML output of REST API

In any case we hope to have made better the service for you - and thanks in advance for any kind of feedback! Best regards,
Dominik

Feature of the week: BibSonomy-Plugin for JabRef released!

2009-02-06T15:18:00.004+01:00

JabRef is an open source bibliography reference manager, based (like BibSonomy) on the BibTeX-format. Starting with version 2.4b1, JabRef can be extended using a plugin system based on the Java Plugin Framework (JPF). We have been asked many times how the advantages of a local client like JabRef and a web-based platform like BibSonomy could be combined - now we think we found a nice solution: We built a BibSonomy-Plugin for JabRef!

This plugin enables you to

fetch publication entries directly from BibSonomy,
upload publications into your personal account at BibSonomy and
delete entries from your collection.

All of the above integrates seamlessly into the usual workflow of JabRef - this means you don't have to visit the BibSonomy webinterface during the whole process. In order to use plugin, you need of course a BibSonomy account. Once you have that, you can follow these simple steps to experience the synergies of JabRef and BibSonomy:

Download JabRef: http://jabref.sourceforge.net/download.php
Download our BibSonomy-Plugin;
Put the Plugin jar-file into a sub-folder called plugins in your JabRef installation directory
Start JabRef and you can start working with the Plugin!

We've also created an extensive documentation of the plugin, along with a detailed description of each of its functionalities and the setup steps.

Please note: Right after releasing our API, we also presented a prototype of a customized JabRef-Client which allowed up- and downloading of entries (see e.g. this post). With the release of the plugin described above, we stop the further development of this customized client. If you are using it, we highly recommend to migrate to a newer JabRef version, combined with our plugin - it contains bugfixes and improved functionality. You will like it :)

We hope this plugin enables you to get the most out of BibSonomy and JabRef - some example tasks which are now easy are:

Download your complete BibSonomy collection into JabRef, use its built-in bibtex-key generator to unify the bibtex keys of your publicatons, and upload all entries again
Download your complete BibSonomy collection into JabRef and perform integrity checks on it (missing fields,...), and upload all entries again
Use JabRef's web search facility to import entries (e.g, from PubMed), edit them locally to your needs, and bulk-upload them to BibSonomy
...

Enjoy,
Dominik

Feature Summary of the Week

2009-02-02T18:43:00.002+01:00

If you have trouble overseeing the large list of features that were
implemented in BibSonomy recently, have a look at the Semantic Web Blog. It summarizes nicely our last activities. Have fun!

Feature of the week: Zotero and BibSonomy integration

2009-01-22T12:19:00.025+01:00

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.

Feature of the week: maven repository

2009-01-09T09:57:00.003+01:00

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: Bibsonomy's new Layout

2008-12-16T13:06:00.005+01:00

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: OpenID support in BibSonomy

2008-12-01T13:39:00.006+01:00

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

Metadata Scraping Service

2008-11-11T16:20:00.001+01:00

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: clouds

2008-10-30T14:50:00.002+01:00

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: status update

2008-10-24T11:30:00.004+02:00

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!