Rexa, a new player in community bibliography management, was opened to the public a couple weeks ago.
Here’s a blog post from the PI on this project (Andrew McCallum) who details the announcement, and a little more here, from Matthew Hurst’s Data Mining blog.
A cursory use of the system shows it to be a sort of “new generation citeseer”, with a little smarter NLP and data mining, and a halfhearted attempt at facet-driven organization. They mention folksonomy in explaining their tags, but from what I can tell, implementation seems to be more like straight-up facet-based personal information management, rather than actual tag-sharing and folksonomy. But, it’s a start. And, the release is accompanied by promises to make it smarter (especially on the data mining side).
All I can say is, you can tell it was made by NLP guys and data miners and not social software guys. Interface-wise, it’s not too friendly (eh? I need to create an account before I can even begin browsing through it?? Before I’m even presented with a link to the “about” page??). And the interface looks like it was designed by a C++ monkey rather than an HTML monkey.
And I won’t even comment on the poor coverage of publications (Andrew promises to improve this). Err, actually looks like I did just comment.
These things being said, they have some GREAT approaches: smart data mining, as well as automatic extraction of author and grant profiles along with the usual paper aggregation (and with promise of forthcoming extraction/aggregation of conferences and research communities!)… it looks like they realize that research (like soylent green) is made of PEOPLE and not just papers.
The thing that really excites me is the suggested examples of tags that the use as seeds for the future folksonomy:
“hot”, “seminal”, “classic”, “controversial”, “enjoyable”
This is exciting because, if this tagging becomes more widespread and mainstream, we’ll FINALLY have a better metric of the value of a publication in academia. Think about it, right now, there are only two kinds of people that can tell the rest of the academic world that a paper is “valuable”: (1) the people on the acceptance/review committee for a conference or journal, and (2) the people who choose to cite a paper in the bibliography of their own publications. And, both of these aren’t too good–the first group is very exclusive and small in number (and at best biased, and at worst unknowledgable in the research niche of a paper’s focus), and the second group requires a high investment of investment to communicate value (need to publish a paper, just to put in a vote–and who ever reads bibliographies closely anyways, unless they’re already looking for something specific)?
The upshot is that, of so many people who read an article, only a very small few get to formally, aggregatably comment on its worth. That’s a lot of untapped, already-invested effort. I would love to see some sort of paper ranking system become more mainstream!