I've lightly used CiteULike to organize a personal bibliography. However, it only exists as a web service, which makes me nervous about the data (yes, even despite the pious FAQ).Perhaps I should clarify my fear. It's not that I distrust the author's motives. However, Richard Cameron could drown in his bathtub tomorrow and the site might go down along with my notes. Less fancifully, if the site began to take up more time or money than he is willing to give, it may vanish. Mainly: I can sleep better at night if the data is on my system.
Is there some reason that you can't export your data periodically? That functionality is there...
[Suggestion for people less busy than I am: it would be really quite awesome to have a taskbar applet or other small utility that periodically grabs your data from CUL and syncs it into a local directory. A plugin for ***conduit*** might be just the thing, now that I think about it!]
useful, certainly. great for lab groups who want a "service" to manage their citations and papers.I think this would be an interesting adjunct to projects like koha/greenstone, jabref, and other citation managment / bibtex tools. Packages might promote some more interop just by existing, to be honest.Hmm. You just mentioned two (three?) tools that I wasn't aware of. I should definitely do some more digging. The feature of CiteULike that I most crave, incidentally, is that it automagically pulls in citations from PubMed and the like. And that I can get bibtex out of it. I don't actually care for the "social networking" aspect of it.
:)bibutils and wikindx are also probably things you should see. I *think* bibutils (the MODS stuff) has a debian package already, but knowing that it exists might save you a lot of trouble at some point. bibutils is also a prereq for wikindx, i believe.
Maybe you know of tools that provide the automagic import capability?
I've seen people (classmates) hack up such things, but I haven't had any direct involvement with such efforts.
What will you call the resulting packages? The code states that it is gplv2, but then there's the whole block of text on the www.connotea.org/code page instructing folks not to brand things as connotea...Hmm. I hadn't actually gone looking at the site before posting yesterday. After a superficial glance, it looks more like they don't want you branding a SERVICE as Connotea. I would think that the package could still use that name, though. On the Connotea site it says:
I think we agree about what our reading(s) of it are, but I think I would still want to consult debian-legal and ask about potential ramifications for the packaging process - just to see what interesting remarks come up as "potential problems"... ;)
--elijah
However, Connotea is a trademark of Nature Publishing Group, so if you use the code to create your own bookmarking service, we ask that you don't brand it as Connotea.