Social bookmarking

EMBL Centre for Computational Biology

30th of May, 2006Michael Kuhn

briefly: my motivation

one year of social

bookmarking

before: over 100 bookmarks in browser

now: only 11 (my toolbar)

over 300 links in

del.icio.us, organized with

tags

conceptsexamples

science 2.0references

remember the Yahoo! catalog?

bookmarks: a similar hierarchy

taxonomy

taxonomyfolk

s

tags

a tag is a keyword you

assign intuitively

Hierarchy Tags

Eukaryota Metazoa Chordata Craniata Vertebrata Euteleostomi Mammalia … Hominidae Homo

homoprimateeukaryotevertebratemammal

ComparisonHierarchy Tags

fixed framework, created

beforehand

dynamic and created on the

spot

logical description

intuitive description

only one categorycan have many

tags

filing is slow tagging is fast

conceptsexamples

science 2.0references

analyze tags and cluster

them

social bookmarking in

academia

keywords are already there!

keywords are not in PubMed

instead:Medical Subject Headings

(MeSH terms)

let readers describe the paper: tagging

managing your references:how does it

work?

CiteULike

Nature Publishing Group

one-man project

links and papers/books

mainly papers/books

partially imports bibliographic data

fully imports bibliographic

data

can keep posts private (optional:

until date)

all posts are public

API to access the data from other

tools no API yet

supports tag intersections

no tag intersections, but can store

PDFs

there are many social bookmarking

sites

social bookmarking

and collaboration

summary of this section

Social bookmarking:… helps you to manage and

organize your references… lets you follow the

references of people you know or trust

… generates recommendations of interesting references for you (but don’t expect wonders yet)

conceptsexamples

science 2.0references

you gain: a fast way to

store and retrieve

information

you get: assistance in finding new

papers

you profit:from the insight of other people

you give: your

bibliography (your selection

of publicly available

information)

conflict between advancing

knowledge and advancing your

career

possible disadvantage:

another scientist

discovers an article earlier

(or at all)

possible disadvantage:someone might

deduce what you are working on

you have to decide if you

want to contribute

(but I think it is worth it)

(also, you can keep your bookmarks

private for some time in Connotea)

take-home message

With social bookmarking …

… you can better keep track of your links and references

… you implicitly share knowledge with other scientists

Next Tuesday:

Stop emailing huge files: How to

jointly edit manuscripts and share data

conceptsexamples

science 2.0references

About social bookmarking:

A two-part review and introduction: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html and http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/lund/04lund.html

Wikipedia articles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy

Scientific social bookmarking:

CiteULike: http://www.citeulike.org/

Connotea: http://www.connotea.org/

General social bookmarking services:

del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/

(plus many others)

Other links:

NCBI taxonomy: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=Taxonomy

Medical Subject Headings: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/