The Hindu : Business : Social academic-paper organiser

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Nov 22, 2004

Business

Business

Social academic-paper organiser

THIS WEEK's column features an on-line service, developed for storing/sharing academic papers among netizens.

If we come across an interesting web site, generally, we keep its link on the local storage, using the browser's bookmark feature for future reference. To access them from anywhere on the Net, we enlist the service of an on-line bookmark manager that allows us to store bookmarks on its server.

Apart from accessing our bookmarks on-line, if we can access bookmarks of other fellow netizens with similar interests, our Web exploration will be much more productive/effective. Such requirements have culminated in the development of on-line social bookmark managers that enable netizens to store/share bookmarks with each other.

The great on-line service `del.icio.us' (http://del.icio.us/), mentioned in this column earlier, is an excellent example of a social bookmark manager service. The service allows you to store the addresses of web pages that you would like to visit again on its server. If you make these bookmarks public, they will become available to other `delicious' users also. The immense popularity gained by such collaborative bookmark services has resulted in the proliferation of a crop of similar services replete with innovative features. The on-line service, Spurl (http://www.spurl.net/), which can be used to share/store complete web pages, is a good example.

Obviously, the concept of a service that facilitates a netizen share what she knows about a Net resource need not be limited to just bookmarks alone. It can further be extended to other resources as well. The new service, CiteULike, a variant of delicious, created for netizens sharing academic papers stored on-line with their peers, is yet another innovative application of this beautiful idea.

A researcher/academician will constantly be monitoring new developments on her area and in that process may regularly discover new research papers/articles. Naturally, if she can share those papers among her team members or with other researchers and also be able to use the ones available with them, it will ultimately benefit the whole research fraternity. In this context, the on-line service, CiteUlike (http://www.citeulike.org/), designed "to help academics to share, store, and organise academic papers that they are reading,'' turns out to be a worthwhile exercise.

After signing up with CiteUlike, whenever you come across a good on-line article/paper and want to share it with others, just post it on to the `CiteUlike' server. While posting the piece, you can assign it to an appropriate subject category so that others looking for documents related to this subject can access them easily. Using the bookmarklet, `Post to CiteUlike,' you can store your favourite articles directly from the browser on to CiteUlike's server.

Another notable feature of the service is that all the latest articles being posted on the service gets automatically displayed on its home page. This provides an excellent opportunity for you to easily view the latest postings on the service. New content can also be read with a news aggregator using the news feed available on the site.

Wikialong

While on a good site, it is likely that you may like to jot down some comments on the content so that it can be used later. Also, if the comments are saved on a public server and the system allows anyone on the Web to contribute to the comment repository, we can easily harness the views of netizens worldwide about the page.

So, we need a solution that lets anyone on the Web to post her comments on a web page as and when she visits the site and also edit/modify/append the comments made by other fellow netizens. The Firefox extension, Wikialong (http://wikalong. phunnel.org/wiki/) seems to be an apt product for such requirements.

The extension Wikialong, once installed, becomes another option in the Firefox's `Sidebar' menu. To make the feature live, access the `Sidebar' and select the option `Wikialong.' Once Wikialong is activated on your browser, it will function like a comment Wiki inside your browser. Whenever you visit a web page, the tool downloads all the comments related to this page from its server and displays them on the browser's left-side margin, alongside the page on its right side. Now you can add/save your own comments or edit/modify the existing ones. Wikialong provides all the required tools for doing the editing with ease.

If no comments are available for the page being visited, Wikialong displays a comment form, where you can write/save your views on the web page. Of course, being a `collaborative comment editing' system, the comments made by you will be available to others as well.

This tool will be more useful in an Intranet set up as it will enable the internal visitors of a page to provide feedback to the web author.

Koders

Due to the spectacular popularity gained by the open source movement, many experienced and budding programmers jump on it. Tens of hundreds of open source projects are hosted on various servers across the Net and the source codes for different problems, written in a wide range of programming languages, are in place. That is, a programmer can probably save his precious time if he can spot an existing source code that provides a solution to his problem. Hence, a search tool that can find relevant modules dispersed across various software repositories will be quite handy. The search engine `Koders' has been designed with this objective. For more details: http://www. koders.com/.

Network services portal

All machines on the Net have got an IP address and from the IP registration details one can gain valuable information on a service provider. Domain Dossier (http://centralops.net/co/DomainDossier.aspx) is an effective on-line service created for this purpose. The On-line utilities portal that hosts this service (http://centralops.net/co/) also has links to other useful on-line network tools that include Email Dossier (for verifying email ids), Browser mirror (`to see what your browser reveals') and so on.

J. Murali

Email the author at: murali27@satyam.net.in

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