SocioBiblog: A Decentralized Platform for Sharing
Bibliographic Information
Aman Shakya1, Hideaki Takeda1 , Vilas Wuwongse2 , and Ikki Ohmukai1 ,1National Institute of Informatics, 2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku,
Tokyo, 101-8430, Japan{ shakya_aman, takeda, i2k }@nii.ac.jp
2
Asian Institute of Technology, Klong Luang, Pathumthani
12120, Thailand
vw@cs.ait.ac.th

Abstract. Sharing of bibliographic information is very important in researchcommunities. SocioBiblog is a semantic blogging system that provides adecentralized environment for this. The SWRC ontology has been used foradding metadata about publications in blogs. SocioBiblog aggregatespublications from the social network neighborhood and co-authors of aresearcher. RSS aggregation has been extended to handle embedded publication
metadata in BuRST feeds. Interoperability with other systems has been
maintained by adopting standard formats. The aggregated collections may besearched and filtered flexibly by metadata criteria. The results can beredistributed as new feeds. Thus, a decentralized ecosystem can be formed
where each unit can publish, aggregate and redistribute information.
Keywords: Decentralized information sharing, semantic blog, bibliographic
metadata, RSS aggregation, SWRC, BuRST.

1 Introduction
Communities of researchers are good examples of online communities. Researchers
need to share information about their publications, bookmark interesting publications
and write comments on them. Moreover, they always need to be up-to-date about
latest publications. Research activities are highly autonomous and thus, we need adecentralized mechanism for such information sharing. We may expect to aggregate
highly relevant resources from closely linked people in the social network. Poolinginformation from various relevant sources and filtering them based on metadata canhelp in creating useful tailored information channels . Blogging is a popular
decentralized technology for easy publishing on the web. However, b ibliographic
information needs to be structured in a standard way and semantic blogging [1]provides this by combining the features of blogging and the Semantic Web.
SocioBiblog is a prototype semantic blogging system enabling researchers to sharebibliographic metadata, aggregate information about publications from different
sources and filter and redistribute such aggregated information.

2 The SocioBiblog Decentralized Platform
SocioBiblog serves information sharing in the community with the following features.
• Decentralized Information Sharing. The system is fully decentralized andsupports both publishing and aggregation of information. We propose
personalized aggregation of bibliographic metadata on individual blogs.
• Social Network based Aggregation. Bibliographic metadata is aggregatedfrom the social network neighborhood of the blog-owner, up to the depth of
two levels . Further, posts by the co-authors of publications are also listed.
• Interoperability. Bibliographic information feeds can be aggregated fromdifferent systems . Moreover, metadata from different systems can be scraped
and quoted in blog entries. Comments can be posted on the publications.
• Integration and Filtering. Information from different sources can be
integrated using a common semantic standard. The collection can be filteredby metadata criteria and the results can be redistributed as a new feed.
SocioBiblog has been implemented as two sub-systems. The publishing systemfacilitates publishing blog entries with metadata about publications. The SWRC
(Semantic Web for Research Communities) ontology [2] has been used for metadata.
BibTeX scrapers extract bibliographic metadata from blogs and bibliographic sites.
Metadata is exported in BuRST (Bibliography Management using RSS Technology)
feeds[3]. The aggregation system aggregates feeds from multiple sources.
RSS/BuRST feed URLs are retrieved from FOAF profiles. A search interface allows
the user to filter aggregated publications by defining various metadata criteria. The
aggregated and filtered BuRST feed thus obtained is exposed as a new BuRST feed.

3 Conclusion
SocioBiblog can act as an active unit which can both publish and aggregate contents
to facilitate information flow in the community forming a decentralized ecosystem.
The network of such units allows flexible handling of information channels and offers
the potential of evolution. The Semantic Web provides the base for sharing structured
information and interoperating with each other and existing systems.

References
1. Cayzer, S.: Semantic Blogging and Decentralized Knowledge Management.
Communications of the ACM, Vol. 47 (2004) 48-52
2. Sure, Y., Bloehdorn, S., Haase, P., Hartmann, J., Oberle, D.: The SWRC Ontology Semantic Web for Research Communities. In: Bento, C., Cardoso, A., Dias, G. (eds.):
Proceedings of the 12th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 3803.
Springer, Covilha Portugal (2005) 218 – 231
3. Mika, P.: Bibliography Management using RSS Technology (BuRST) (2005)
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~pmika/research/burst/BuRST.html

SocioBiblog - Demo Description
1 Publication and Commenting
SocioBiblog 1 provides metadata entry forms for different SWRC publications.
BibTeX snippets can also be imported directly to fill the forms . Publication metadataentry is exported in SWRC, BibTeX formats and BuRST feeds. Blog entries canquote publication metadata from other blogs and bibliographic sites and comment onthem. It supports bidirectional commenting using trackback and annotation.
Blog this bookmarklet. Commenting has been made convenient by employing
javascript bookmarklet. The bookmarklet captures the title, URL, trackback ping URLof the blog entry being annotated and any highlighted text .
BibTeX Scraping. Blog this also scrapes out BibTeX information if available.
SocioBiblog currently provides scrapers for SocioBiblog instances, the ACM digitallibrary and a generic BibTeX scraper which works for any web page that contains
BibTeX snippet (applicable for Citeseer, DBLP, BibSonomy, CiteULike, etc).
Metadata Search. Bibliographic metadata in a blog can be searched by specifying
various metadata values. It also searches into the metadata quoted from other sources.
Blogroll and FOAF Profile. The blogroll is also exp orted as a FOAF profile.

2 BuRST/RSS Aggregation
Social Network based Aggregation. The system aggregates BuRST/RSS feeds fromthe social network neighborhood of the blog-owner, up to two levels deep – directly
linked friends and friends of the friends. The path to the linked friends is also shown.
Feeds from other bibliographic systems and repositories can also be added to theblogroll. For example, SocioBiblog can aggregate BuRST feeds from BibSonomy .
The latest aggregated publications and posts are displayed alongside in the blog.
The system separates publications and non-publications. Further, when a publication
is opened, BuRST/RSS feeds of the co-authors are downloaded and shown alongside.
FOAF Crawler. A crawled FOAF database can be searched for FOAF links.
Aggregated search, filtering and mixing. The BuRST feeds aggregated frommultiple sources can be searched and sorted by SWRC fields like title, author, type,etc. The system also searches the metadata quoted in comments on publications.
Commented publications are distinguished from original publications. The aggregatedand filtered results obtained are exported as new BuRST feed. The user can subscribe
to this BuRST feed in his/her RSS reader and receive the latest desired updates . The
feed can further be combined with other sources to form new channels .
1 An online demo is available at http://dutar.ex.nii.ac.jp/