Social Bookmarking For Scientists - The Best Of Both Worlds

What is Connotea
Connotea (http://www.connotea.org/) represents the unlikely merger of two radically different worlds... sort of Paris Hilton meets Carl Sagan in my ever low tech mind. Actually Social bookmarking is a technique for Internet users to search for information, organize it, tag it, and manage the resulting bookmarks of web resources. Users can add descriptions to the bookmarks so future users are informed of the content without needing to download (tags). This becomes “social” as many users contribute keywords to the tag. If you want to research this the terms folksonomy, and social tagging come in handy. Social bookmarking is just users saving links to web pages system that they want to retain or share. This isn’t the same as file sharing because the files aren’t shared, only the bookmarks that allow other users to locate them.

The Purpose of Connotea
Nature Publishing Group (NPG)’s New Technology team developed Connotea as a system of organization oriented to the needs of scientists and clinicians who need to locate and organize original research and its citable references. NPG’s intended Connotea to address the highly specific needs of researchers by merging web based approaches of social bookmarking with the reference management systems commonly used. Users are researching scholarly articles and need comprehensive information that is required for a standard formal citation such as the name of the journal, and details including dates, volumes and pages. There is a similar service called CiteULike which is not included in the paper.

The paper becomes comprehensible only to a highly specialized audience-
The paper addresses the technology of the search and specific techniques employed by Connotea. This is where they lost me:
”To address this concern, and to facilitate reference linking within primary research, the scholarly publishing community makes use of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), assigning a DOI to each article published. CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org/) maintains a look-up table of DOIs and publisher URLs, along with the basic bibliographic information for the article. DOIs can be de-referenced by prefixing them with http://dx.doi.org/, which simply redirects to the publisher URL (for example, here is a DOI link for a paper about Connotea published in D-Lib Magazine: http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/april2005-lund). If the publisher URL changes, the CrossRef database is updated and link integrity is maintained, and hence the dx.doi.org link is considered permanent.”

Which immediately precedes the section termed “The Whine”. (Very near the conclusions of the paper termed “The Wish.”) While the paper includes screen shots and definitions intended to make it more accessible, the writers often lapse into very dense descriptions which are comprehensible only to those with adequate expertise (which is, to say, not me).

Luckily the description of our new exploration of social bookmarking sounds much less intimidating as it is described by the instructor.