Einen Überblick über “Webbasierte Literaturverwaltung” gab Thomas Stöber von der UB Augsburg in seinem Vortrag zusammen mit Astrid Teichert auf der INETBIB 2008. Das Thema ist eigentlich nicht neu, aber nicht jeder hat die Zeit und Muße, sich selber mit RefWorks, citeulike, Connotea und BibSonomy im Vergleich zu EndNote und Citavi zu beschäftigen – außerdem sollte man das Firefox-Plugin Zotero kennen.

Auf der einen Seite stehen die traditionellen, “geschlossenen” Systemen (EndNote, Citavi), bei denen ein Nutzer für sich alleine bibliographische Daten sammelt und verwaltet. “Halboffene” Systeme (EndNote Web, RefWorks) bieten als Webanwendungen zusätzlich die Möglichkeit, Daten für andere Nutzer freizugeben. Bei “Offenen” Systeme ist der Nutzerkreis prinzipiell offen und alle bibliographischen Daten werden miteinander geteilt.

Die offenen Literaturverwaltungs-Systeme bieten neue Kooperationsmöglichkeiten im Bereich Forschung und Lehre, Stöber zitierte Lambert Hellers Hinweis auf die Möglichkeit “Informeller Gemeinschaftsbibliographien“. Dabei lassen sich aus seiner Sicht drei wesentliche Anwendungszenarien unterscheiden:

(1) Freigabe des eigenen Datenpools mit Lesezugriff, z.B. Literaturlisten für Lehrveranstaltungen, Bibliographien, eigene Schriftenverzeichnisse etc. (RefWorks…)

(2) Geschlossene Arbeitsgruppen arbeiten gemeinsam an Bibliographien (EndNote Web, BibSonomy…)

(3) Gemeinsamer, offener Datenpool (BibSonomy…)

Für die weitere Entwicklung stellen sich angesichts der rasanten Entwicklungen im Bereich webbasierter Literaturverwaltung folgende Fragen:

(1) Ist die offene, gemeinschaftliche Arbeiten an Bibliographien ein realistisches Modell für eine offene Wissenschaft? Laura Cohen spricht schon begeistert von “Social Scholarship (wobei meiner Meinung nach dabei eher Blogs von Bedeutung sind, siehe blogs as scholarship von Georgia Harper und als Beispiel Research Blogging). Viele Wissenschaftler möchten jedoch vermutlich nur ungern ihre Literaturlisten offenlegen (was meiner Meinung nach nicht unbedingt für die Qualität ihrer Forschung spricht).

(2) Sind OpenSource-Anwendung aktuell und zukünftig eine echte Alternative zu kommerziellen Systemen? Thomas Stöber konnte diese Frage nicht bejahen – ich denke vor allem bei der Usability hat OpenSource regelmäßig Probleme.

(3) Wie entwickeln sich Bibliographie-Verwaltungssysteme weiter? Zur Zeit ist eine Konvergenz der Funktionen zu beobachten, so dass sich die verschiedenen Systeme im Kern immer weniger unterscheiden.

In der anschließenden Fragerunde meldeten sich vor Allem die “üblichen Verdächtigen” (Till Kinstler, Lambert Heller, Patrick Danowski) zu Wort – ich war zu sehr mit der Formulierung dieses Beitrags beschäftigt und kann der Einführung nichts wesentliches hinzufügen. Mir fehlte nur etwas Zotero. Herr Stöber wies darauf hin, dass sich das Programm in erstaunlich kurzer Zeit zu einer vollwertigen Literaturverwaltung entwickelt hat. Dem in der Diskussion gebrachten Hinweis auf die Notwendigkeit von Werbung und Benutzerschulungen kann ich mich nur anschließen.

P.S.: Eine tabellarische Übersicht von Programmen zur Literaturverwaltung gibt beim Max Planck Institut für Biochemie.

When people google key terms, they need no brain effort to do research: everybody can type a word or a phrase into a search engine (in former times, one needed basic knowledge about the organisation of a library and the way a keyword catalogue operates, and one needed to work with the so-called “snowball system” to find new fitting literature in the reference lists of already found literature). So there is a clear shift in the field of research towards a research without brains.

I wonder how the study’s authors do research if not by using a search engine from time to time. Especially if you do research about Google or Wikipedia, you are pretty lost if you limit yourself to references in already published peer-reviewed papers. To me the argument unmasks a common angst among traditional researchers: on the Web everyone is allowed to do research, so someone without diploma could do better than someone with diploma! The quote continues:

But there also is another shift [...] Today one must observe countless students copying passages from Wikipedia. Thus a term paper can be produced within a few minutes. Students lose the key abilities of searching, finding, reading, interpreting, writing and presenting a scientific paper with own ideas and arguments, developed after a critical close reading process of original texts.

If you ask your students to create a paper that dozens of people have created before in the same way, then of course they will copy & paste it! It’s in the task formulation: If (and only if!) a question has already been answered in a Wikipedia article, then the solution should contain of nothing but a single link to a specific version. The key abilities is then to find out whether the Wikipedia article is appropriate or not (by the way the authors of the study seem to not know how to cite Wikipedia by article version).

In my opinion there is another shift that many traditional scientists do not understand: A shift from the culture of documents to a culture of networks. It’s similar to the shift from oral culture to written text. I am sure that when script was invented people complained about a loss of ability to memorize. But if you can store text on paper you do not have to memorize all. Same now with the Web: If you can link to a text, you do not have to copy it. You link to a specific version, change it, and the reader can see your contributions in a diff. Ok, there is the problem that inclusion, versioning, diffs, backlinks etc. are not supported very well on the current Web. But the shift from oral culture to culture of documents took far more time, and the Web is still in its infancy (by the way libraries should finally start to deal with archiving and documenting networked documents and collaboration).

The quote ends with a statement that I can partly agree upon:

Instead of that they use Google, Copy & Paste and PowerPoint.
they use Google, Copy & Paste and PowerPoint. Their brains are now contaminated by fragmented Google search terms and the bullet points of PowerPoint. For a critique on PowerPoint see also [Tufte 2006].

Tufte’s critique on PowerPoint is brilliant. But this is another issue and he more criticises bad and unappropriate slides. Of course you have to know your tools and media and how to use them in them right way. It’s the same with talks, research and publications: you can do it right or wrong. Looks like most parts of traditional academia still does it wrong.

If the authors of the study had used a public wiki to collaboratively create the report (=right), you could have found out at least, who wrote the interesting parts and who wrote the crap – but this is not how traditional academia works, where titles and lists of publications are more important than the actual outcome in growth and perfection of knowledge.

After coffee break Haibo Jia presented A new Formal Concept Analysis based learning approach to Ontology building. He extracted 2201 different author keywords and 107 different classification terms from 900 documents of the ACM, added stemming and used the result to create an ontology for query expansion. I hope to follow his work with extraction and analyzing author keywords and classification terms too.

I could not follow the following presentation Formalizing Dublin Core Application Profiles Description Set Profiles and Graph Constraints by Fredrik Enoksson although I would have liked to get to now Alistair’s work. Dublin Core Application Profiles will surely become more important in the future but this presentation did not help me a lot – maybe I was just inattentive because of my own presentation.

So I switched to another session and saw one of my highlights: Panayiota Polydoratou presented the project Repository Interface for Overlaid Journal Archives (RIOJA). To prepare the establishement of an “Overlay Journal” a detailed survey was held among researchers in the astrophysics and cosmology community. The overlay journal concept was already coined by Ginsparg in 1996: a peer-reviewed journal is organized on top of a repository like arXiv.org. The survery showed that most scientists are not interested in a printed journal but in quality control and copyediting. Everything else can already be done with the repository (which the asked scientists already use a lot).

By the way: RIOJA is not the only project to prepare and create an overlay journal. I found the JISC founded Overlay journal infrastructure for Meteorological Sciences (OJIMS) and the Logical Methods in Computer Science (LCMS) which exists since 2005. Peter Murray pointed out that the blog TotallySynthetic.com and the digital library Crystaleye for instance can be called overlay journals. Looks like the concept of a journal is highly evolving (Wake up librarians! When will you finally start to collect weblogs? The Times They Are A-Changin’!). Ok, back to the conference, I will later think more about Overlay Journals, OpenAccess, Science 2.0, OAI-ORE…

In the next session I saw Fredrik Enoksson with An RDF Modification Protocol, based on the Needs of Editing Tools. He explainded that usually RDF is stored in triple stores and there is a need for a remotely editing RDF. In the luisa project a remote editing protocol for RDF is developed and the existing SPARQL update language needs to be extended to fullfill the needs of editing applications.

Beside the low number of participants my own presentation went very well – I got two good questions that helped me to think more about an SKOS encoding of country codes. The slides are at slideshare and a paper will follow.

Finally there were also some posters – but no real poster session to find the corresponding authors of a particular poster. A poster titled Combining Collaborative Tagging and Ontologies in Image Retrieval Systems attracted my attention because of the topic, but it looked very drafted and the explanation contained several gaps so I cannot say whether it contained some valuable research or not. I think the basic idea was to enrich a query with additional synonyms and query a combined index of automatically generated index terms, controlled terms assigned by the creator, and uncontrolled tags.

Video recordings of the presentations will be published in the next weeks and post-proceedings will be published in springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.

Miguel-Angel Sicilia explained the ORS plans in more detail with his presentation From open access to open research and information sustainability. The proposed ORS Journals (which ORS should not be limited to) are going to be full open access without author fees and all research data must be provided. Peer review is planned to be double-blind but there will be additional experiments with other review methods to find out how peer review could be changed. Sicilia also talked about Open Access and Information Sustainability which is a hard challenge given the explosion of publication.

My first impression of the Open Research Society is very promising – we should collaborate with Science Commons, Wikimedia and similar projects!

Beim Stöbern ist mir aufgefallen, dass Nature (siehe History of Nature) in der momentan stattfindenden Evolution der Wissenschaftskommunikation ziemlich gut dabei ist: Connotea, Nature Precedings, Nature Network, Nature Blogs, Nature Podcast, Second Nature etc. Es gibt aber auch noch einige Verbesserungsmöglichkeiten, so sind die verschiedenen Dienste bislang noch nicht ausreichend miteinander verknüpft.

But the authors of SemKey don’t cite Gabrilovich and Markovitch (2006): Overcoming the brittleness bottleneck using Wikipedia: Enhancing text categorization with encyclopedic knowledge which is highly related (see also the following paper of Gabrilovich and Markovitch). Looks like both Marchetti et al. and their reviewers of the WWW 2007 workshop don’t know about their subject area. The feedback on SemKey is also little: This is science 1.0 about Web 2.0. Researchers 2.0 publishe their work on weblogs and preprint archives or even dare to fight in the jungle of Wikipedia to push forward knowledge instead of citation rank.