Connotea

1
Connotea

• A Social Bookmarking Tool for Scientists

2
What is Connotea?

• Connotea is a free online reference management
  and social bookmarking service for scientists,
  created by the Nature Publishing Group. (Lund,
  2005).

3
When, how, and why did Connotea come to be?

• Designed, developed, and launched late in 2004.
• Creators (Ben Lund, Tony Hammond, Martin Flack,
  Timo Hannay, Joanna Scott, and Stefania Bojano )
  were inspired by social bookmarking sites like
  del.icio.us.
• They modeled Connotea after del.icio.us, but
  tailored it to meet the needs of a specific
  academic community, scientists.

4
In practical terms, what does this mean?

• In contrast to the traditional model of personal
  online reference management (i.e., a database of
  online citations and favorites stored locally
  on a users PC), Connotea
• Offers online storage of references and bookmarks
• Has simple, non-hierarchical, flat organization
  (tagging)
• All references bookmarks can be made visible to
  the public for discovery and resource sharing.
• Auto-discovery of bibliographic information
• Bookmarklets

5
Offers online storage of references bookmarks
6
Auto-discovery of bibliographic information

• Screenshot shows a reference being added via the
  bookmarklet

7
Connotea technologies

• RSS feeds
• Folksonomy
• Non-proprietary software (Perl, MySQL)
• Bookmarklets

8
Case Study (April 2005) Second-Order Effects

• Tag convergence
• Users deliberately choosing tags to converge with
  other users
• Implicit recommendation
• Wherever possible, a list of related tags is
  provided
• Semi-automatic directory pages
• If Google search term coincides w/Connotea tag
  name, Connotea result usually ranks highly

9
Future of Connotea

• Expanding number of sites whose URLs Connotea
  recognizes.
• More privacy controls for bookmarks
• Encouragement of interested parties to utilize
  Connoteas code to
• Assist in developing similar sites
• Providing feedback to improve Connotea

10
References

• Hammond, T., Hannay, T., Lund, B., Scott, J.
  (2005, April). Social Bookmarking Tools (I) A
  General Review. D-Lib Magazine, 11(4). Retrieved
  October 4, 2006 from http//www.dlib.org/dlib/apri
  l05/hammond/04hammond.html.
• Lund, B., Hammond, T., Flack, M., Hannay, T.
  (2005, April). Social Bookmarking Tools (II) A
  Case Study Connotea. D-Lib Magazine (11(4).
  Retrieved October 4, 2006 from http//www.dlib.org
  //dlib/april05/lund/04lund.html.