P2P Bibliographies with Bibster 79
Noksagt writes "P2P isn't just for government documents anymore! Bibster assists researchers in managing, searching, and sharing bibliographic data in a peer-to-peer network. This project shows great promise to researchers who currently search for citations through centralized servers (Google, Scirus, CiteSeer, ISI. and many others). By making it decentralized, researchers can share bibliographic data with no subscription costs and avoid typing this data in by hand. It can import and export citations using bibtex. The project is GPLed and free clients for windows and Linux are available. There's also a Sourceforge page for Bibster, so you can checkout from the CVS if the Bibster site is slow."
wait a minute... (Score:4, Funny)
the CVS server will slow down before the website.
Re:wait a minute... (Score:3, Interesting)
The CVS is hosted by sourceforge, which can handle significant load. The website is hosted on some University computer & I had trouble reaching it when I was emailed the link. So it might not be able to handle the load as well.
Cool (Score:1)
People who cite will also read the paper (Score:2, Interesting)
So you have to prepare the content, and you might as well submit it to those journals, conferences
Which raises the question. . . (Score:1)
. . . will this actually be useful?
>This system will be useful when one has a paper
>in hand, but does not have the bibtex entry.
Perhaps I'm spoiled by working in a field with very good online databases and journals that require only brief bibliographic entries, but it's hard to imagine where this would actually be useful. 95% of the papers one has in hand were located via an online database and came with bibtex entries. On the rare occasion one finds a paper copy of an article and no bibtex e
We Need a News Version of This! (Score:3, Funny)
Seriously, having a collaborative system for journalism with moderation and web of trust like elements could be wonderful - anyone got any bright ideas on how to do it?
Re: Psychic Answer (Score:4, Funny)
Did you just ask a question? If you did, it appears the answer is "No"
Re:We Need a News Version of This! (Score:1)
The ideal would be a system that posts articles from current news sources (full text, not just links), individuals on the site, with a commenting feature. The art
Re:We Need a News Version of This! (Score:2)
I think a news sindication/decentralized publication would be the greatest application ever made... It would be a killer app for p2p... The uses are endless, but done right, it could be run as a server backend for dynamic websites(like Google News, almost) or by using routing and encryption algos could be the answer to anti-censorhip...
OK, those were to huge ideas that wouldn't be done rig
Re:We Need a News Version of This! (Score:2)
You've got that mixed up. By definition the public key is public, so ...only readers who have the author's public key... is effectively anybody who is interested.
Re:We Need a News Version of This! (Score:2)
using public key encryption means that John uses his private key to encrypt his article. Now, users who track John's articles can decrypt using his freely available public key. That means, anyone who wants can read John's articles, true, but it also means that when an article is said to be written by John, a user can prove it because only John can encrypt using his private key... it authenticates the author so you can't spoof someone's identity.
ahhh, p2p... (Score:5, Funny)
"Could you send over that citation for that lagomorph genome paper?"
"Sure thing. I'll send some Steely Dan too, it helps me when I read papers about the lagomorph genome."
"31337, thx."
Re:ahhh, p2p... (Score:2)
CC.
Doom 3 pirated--news that Slashdot won't report (Score:1, Interesting)
Shouldn't that be... (Score:1, Funny)
Citation Index (Score:4, Interesting)
So... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:So... (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose it's the same as a wiki: I too first thought it was the dumbest idea to allow everybody and their dogs to edit webpages, but in any wiki I used, the content always turned out to have a pretty good S/N ratio. I still don't understand why, but wikis work. Just look at wikipedia... So perhaps this will work too...
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
Wow... Well, lets put aside the subtle notion that people are benevolent and never do wrong to a wiki, and realize the Wikipedia uses strict moderation and privledges, letting a huge moderation team track various pages along with the ability to ban users or lock pages from being edited(George W. Bush's page cannot be edited, for example).
Wikis work because they have a chain of command.
Re:So... (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe. On the other hand, an encyclopedia every idiot can add to [wikipedia.org] turned out alright. But they have a certain amount of centralized control to keep things from getting out of hand.
Fortunately, few idiots (or anyone else) have much of an incentive to falsify bibliographic data.
-jim
Re:So... (Score:1)
Re:So... (Score:1)
Authors, titles, approximate year of publication, etc... Anyone citing an article should see at a glance that these are correct. So what damage can a forger do? Start inserting false publisher fields? A bit embarrassing for the author, perhaps, but nothing too serious.
Full texts? User comments? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Full texts? User comments? (Score:5, Informative)
citeseer [psu.edu] has full text available for for most of its articles, and its a free service, so maybe copyright isn't such a big deal for some reason. Maybe it's because most papers in computer science are available from the author's website.
-jim
Re:Full texts? User comments? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Full texts? User comments? (Score:1)
Re:Full texts? User comments? (Score:2, Interesting)
There are already some sites out there doing something similar like the Media Awareness Project [http] [mapinc.org] which collects and archives research on drug policy. From what I can tell, they only get sued when they get too big, present content with a bias, or try to profit.
I find it hard to believe my little project is t
Re:Full texts? User comments? (Score:2)
Re:Full texts? User comments? (Score:1)
That's quite easy to do: if I have the article in ps or pdf, then the name of the file is the name of the bibtex-key. And every article is in the 'articles' directory next to the beloved
it would be awesome if user comments could be added to each citation.
I use the annote field. However, how can you be sure that the review is accurate?
Re:Full texts? User comments? (Score:2)
S2S is such a network for academic users as the target group. It is currently in a test phase. Sponsored by the German government. Also includes an expert client, where you can sign yourself up as an expert for a specific area and get to answer questions. According to the current statistic, the network provides over 1 million documents.
Homepage is here, but in German: http://s2s.neofonie.de/ [neofonie.de]
Standards based? (Score:5, Interesting)
Especially as NISO is recommending them in their current 'Metasearch Initiative [niso.org]' -- an industry/academic/government cross sector committee with the major players and interested parties for allowing cross searching of bibliographic databases with other sorts of things.
(ObDisc, member of both SRW Editorial Board and Taskgroup 3 of NMSI)
--Azaroth
Re:Standards based? (Score:4, Informative)
SRW/U [loc.gov] hopes to supplant Z39.50. Not only does it use MODS, but it still uses ZeeRex [z3950.org] and CQL [loc.gov]
For more nerdy e-refererence stuff, check out darcusblog [muohio.edu]
Re:Standards based? (Score:1)
RDF query language.
Re:Standards based? (Score:1)
The other big issue I have with Bibster is that it is based on bibtex, which may be widely used in the hard sciences, but which is not international-friendly, has a bad data model insufficient to the task of representing the sorts of data that scholars in the humanities
But.. (Score:5, Interesting)
If we were to look at another project, say, CDDB, which stores meta-data for CDs (Title, Arist, Track Listing), something not at all unlike storing meta-data for books (bibliographies), you'll note that CDDBs entries are frequently inaccurate, mispelled and just plain wrong.
When it comes down to it, I don't really trust Random Joe to provide accurate trustworthy info. It's not like its like Wikipedia, or anything, which has constant peer review and a clear history.
Re:But.. (Score:2)
GPG signatures? (Score:2)
Re:GPG signatures? (Score:2)
I'm a geek... (Score:3, Insightful)
"My system's better anyway. I have a file, with the exact bibliography printed on the folder, for every article I've read or written. If I need one, it's right there. If I need to use the citation, I can just copy it from my Excel spreadsheet. Now why would this thing be better?"
Some people are born geeks, I guess.
Re:I'm a geek... (Score:3, Interesting)
This would be better because when she reads a new article, she could get the bibliography from someone else, rather than having to type it in herself.
Of course, if she has read so few papers, and does so little writing, that Excel (and Word? Ick!) work for her purposes, then this might be an exercise in gilding lillies.
I use Emacs, with reftex and bibtex, and find that it works far better fo
Re:I'm a geek... (Score:2)
By that time, she'll probably abandon her filing cabinets. It's one thing to keep a few hundred files, but we won't have room for ten years of her readings.
Re:I'm a geek... (Score:2)
As I said, I use Emacs with Reftex for writing. Reftex will let me search for citations in my bibliography file. I use a key made up of the first author's family name and the year. I have innumerable papers in my bibliography
Re:I'm a geek... (Score:2)
Her advisor is anti-computers. She's afraid that the computer will change the data when you're not looking. They employ about 15 people to run their lab (includes students, which receive credits and not money). I'd guess that most of those students could be removed from the process and replaced with a computerized data input process. You know, instead of 80 page
Re:I'm a geek... (Score:2)
We used to perform some economics experiments by hand. It was a lot of bother, but for some thing
Re:I'm a geek... (Score:4, Interesting)
I tried to keep a system like that going for a while. It's one thing to be good about saying "Wow, that was a good article, I should fill out the bibliography right now in case I should like to cite it someday." It doesn't take much discipline since it happens roughly once a year. It takes a whole other level of discipline I just don't have to keep filling in those entries for articles I get bored with halfway through, stacks of articles my boss dumps on my desk, articles I read and decide are completely irrelevant to anything I'll ever be interested in, etc.
Nowadays I just use SciFinder or one of the other databases which can export in citation manager friendly format instead of typing in by hand. I'm not sure I see how P2P would make my life any easier. However these are all (SciFinder, SciSearch, ISI to be sure, not so sure about others) for fee databases that require my University to pay a subscription. I'm all for the free exchange of information, especially in the scientific community, so if this facititates it, I'm on board.
Bibster for Mac OS X? (Score:1)
What an interface! (Score:4, Interesting)
Next, they'll perfect image search:
A possible inquiry could be: I want to see defiance in the face of insurmountable odds.
As a result Imagester returns images depicting defiance in the face of insurmountable odds.
Seriously, are they offering anything better than standard keyword and author search? What I'd really like to see is such a bibliography database that ranks search results usign a PageRank-like algorithm (as I recall, the idea for PageRank derived from research on citation graphs, so this would bring things full circle).
I'd also like to see Google start parsing publications and indexing them by author, year, and citations. The bibliography databases that I'm familiar with require manual input of new entries; it would be cool if this could be done automatically instead. Of course, there will need to be some interface to correct erroneous entries, and this opens up a large can of worms.
Re:What an interface! (Score:2)
Google could start by making use of "author" and "date" meta elements of all web pages and providing a search field for them on the "Advanced search" page.
Re:What an interface! (Score:1)
Yes, though it may be hard to see this at first. The system makes it possible to query for specific properties of citation entries, which is more precise than simple keyword search. Also, in the current release of the software the interface is limited to a few 'fixed' properties, but there is no underlying technical reason for this, it could be easily extended to allow the user to search for arbitrary properties of any ci
Right direction or ..... (Score:2)
Many universities are paying tons of money to privitized databases to store either full text articles (for some)or simply the abstacts so students can search and read articles to their hearts delight. They are, in my experience, unreliable as well. The systems crash, you get database errors or lose the connect
OK, When will someone (Score:3, Interesting)
When will someone sit down, using an open source model ofcourse, and write the 'granddad' p2p protocol? It doesn't have to require everything, just has to be able to support everything... Encryption, hidden routing(not being able to tell who is requesting data vs. who is just passing data along), multiple source download, huge scaling, efficient and distributed search, etc.
This public network could become the defacto to what open source apps work off of. As long as the protocol is the focus(a nice gui as well, but seperate the frontend from the backend), you could use it link to files on your website, or you could have multiple apps(a music/napster like app, a scientific research paper app, a bibliographies app, a usenet discussion thread app) each of them using a common protocol, and routing between them, but each app filters out the noise it doesn't want.
It could be the killer app, it could have every major p2p app migrate to it. Project Gutenberg, Bibster, linuxiso.org, all using a common protocol and network.... *drools*
Re:OK, When will someone (Score:2)
It's still beta stuff, but there's also some publications along with the code on the site.
Re:OK, When will someone (Score:1, Informative)
Re:FREENET (Score:2)
freenet doesn't scale well, it has huge routing and discovery issues, making it very unusable... a WWW sized freenet would be crippled, not improved. These are bugs in the code, they need to be fixed.
Freenet doesn't allow the hosting of files, it only allows for submitting. I can't have freenet://wikipedia.org hosted on my own box, and thus ensuring that it is online. Freenet only lets me insert a file or website. That site has to be resubmitted repeatedly(daily, weekly, hourl
NLP would be nice (Score:2, Insightful)
Just what college students need: fake cites! (Score:2)
Slick solution to a common problem in academia (Score:1)
For example, a faculty member may be sponsored by several different projects, each of which wants that faculty member to update their web page with each new publication.
Odds are, most faculty will update their own personal page and possibly one project page. This leaves the other projects needing to harangue the faculty member in to updating their pages.
For example, a postdoc comes and visits, write
Forest for the trees... (Score:1)
What's the difference between a database and a hard drive again?
Re: (Score:2)
Er, ah, um, am I just completely incompetent? (Score:1)
I've installed the thing. It seems to see peers. So I thought I'd search for a very, very common author. I entered Dana Scott. Nothing. I entered Tanenbaum. Nothing. I entered local boy Vaandrager. Nothing. I entered Barendregt. Nothing. I entered "concurrent". Nothing.
I entered my name. I got everything I've ever published. But then I had imported my own Bibtex files, so I'm not surprised (I've never cited any matches for the abo
Re:Er, ah, um, am I just completely incompetent? (Score:2)
The real trick is getting your peers to buy in to the program--they will likely have many references you'd be interested in anyway.
Text interface? Please? (Score:1)
I'd like it more if I was uploading in the background and my queries had a lighter, smaller interface, say a shell interface. Better yet (much better) an xemacs interface that works well with reftex.
I know that the latter is much too much to ask for a young product, but I hope that the authors give developers (not me) some APIs to get some lighter weight clients out there.
Assuming I ever get a non-local match for