Nature's Connotea tagging of OA articles in Eprints

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

             ** Apolgies for Cross-Posting **

This item is from Peter Suber's Open Access News
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_03_19_fosblogarchive.html#114278926660782258

More on Connotea tagging of OA articles in Eprints

Timo Hannay, Linking Up Research Papers Using Tags, You're It!
March 16, 2006.
http://tagsonomy.com/index.php/linking-together-the-academic-literature-with-tags/

Excerpt:

"Back in my first post to this blog, 
<http://www.earlham.edu/index.php/introduction-timo-hannay/> I 
said that over here at Nature <http://www.nature.com/> we're 
interested in the question of "how far tagging can take us in 
tackling the (formidable) information organisation needs of 
modern science." Today we're starting on a cool (I think) new 
experiment that might help provide some early answers.  Many of 
you are no doubt familiar with Matt Biddulph's wonderful mock-up 
<http://www.hackdiary.com/archives/000067.html> pf the BBC Radio 
3 website as it might work with embedded <http://del.icio.us> 
functionality. (See in particular Matt's Flash movie here.) 
<http://www.hackdiary.com/misc/firefox-delicious-demo.html>

"Inspired by this, we've just released some code 
<http://www.connotea.org/taggingtool> that adds the same type of 
functionality (but this time for real) to 'institutional 
repositories' (IRs) - websites that scientists and other 
academics use to share their work with each other.  One general 
problem with IRs is that, notwithstanding services like Google 
Scholar, a lot of their content isn't very easy to find, and it 
certainly isn't easy to browse between related items in different 
repositories. Our new code aims to improve things by allowing IR 
users to tag articles and see links to related content, all from 
within the IR web page itself. Behind the scenes, the software 
communicates with http://del.icio.us and/or Connotea (Nature's 
own social bookmarking service for scientists). 
<http://www.connotea.org/>

"Since Connotea is open source, it will also work with any 
instance of Connotea Code. <http://www.connotea.org/code> The 
good folks at the University of Southampton's Electronics and 
Computer Science Department have now put this code on their 
institutional repository, <http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/> 
creating our first real-world installation (yeah!)....

"The recommendations (which are generated based mainly on tag 
co-occurrence) already seem OK to me, but they should get better 
as more links and tags get entered into the system.  There's lots 
of different IR software out there, and our code currently only 
works with EPrints, which we chose because it's very popular, is 
written in a language (Perl) that we're familiar with, and has a 
friendly development team just down the road from us. 
<http://www.eprints.org/>

"If you're the administrator of an EPrints repository then you 
can get instructions and code from here. 
<http://www.connotea.org/taggingtool> I'm told that it's a doddle 
to install."

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_03_19_fosblogarchive.html#114278926660782258