Connotea and Zotero

[Marcus P S]

I am wondering about the possibility of using Zotero as local storage
for Connotea references. The motivation for this is that Connotea is
also open source, and documentation about its Web API is readily
available

http://www.connotea.org/wiki/WebAPI

Connotea also has the nice feature that it can extract information from
abstract web pages from various journals to populate the fields of a
citation entry. It can also export entries in various formats (BibTeX,
RIS, etc), which is extremely useful for users of LaTeX in particular.
Collaborating with the Connotea project would reduce dublication of
code, and automatically provide for platform independent internet
storage of storage reference database.

Is this a project that other people would be interested in working on?

[Bruce D'Arcus]

On 10/30/06, Marcus P S <marc...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Collaborating with the Connotea project would reduce dublication of
> code, and automatically provide for platform independent internet
> storage of storage reference database.
>
> Is this a project that other people would be interested in working on?

I agree this might be a promising avenue to explore, not least because
the Connotea people are experienced with RDF.

One problem might be that Connotea has a different -- more limited --
design focus. It's designed to store journal articles for the needs of
hard scientists, and not much else (not surprising given that Nature
sponsored its development). That's not to say that couldn't change,
though, and it would make sense to at least talk to them.

I'd like to see some agreement on common:

1) identity scheme (probably OpenID)
2) API
3) data format (the RDF stuff)

Bruce

[Daniel Cohen]

Bruce is right about the more limited design focus (on articles) for
Connotea (which makes full information exchange somewhat
problematic). But as Bruce and Marcus note, the link is promising,
and indeed one of the developers from Connotea has already been in
touch with us and is working on linking Zotero to Connotea. We'll
contact him to see if he needs help (if he's not a subscriber to this
list and doesn't chime in shortly). It has always been our intention
that Zotero work well with services like Connotea, and we would like
to see other connections (e.g., to CiteULike, del.icio.us, etc.) as
well even though we are going to build our own server for information
exchange and sharing.

Dan

[Josh Greenberg]

Hey, all...

Actually, I've just exchanged e-mails with Ben Lund (project manager at Nature for Connotea); I'm assuming he won't mind if I migrate part of our correspondence onto this lost (and Ben, if you're not on the zotero-dev google group, you should join!). I've included a chuck of our most recent exchange below...

Just saw that Dan C. beat me to the punch on this, but I'd love to see someone start working on this utility for Zotero (as we're thinking things through, we're envisioning a "utility" as distinct piece of software that augments the functionality of the original Zotero extension, either as a separate extension within Firefox or outside the browser). I've actually been thinking of writing something similar to synchronize just "link" and "webpage snapshot" data types with del.icio.us.

For the moment, anyone want to take this Connotea ball and run with it? Marcus, you brought up the idea, so if you'd like to take a look at the Connotea API Javascript wrapper Ben links to below and get in touch with him, you should be able to use the developer documentation that Dan Stillman's gotten up on the dev wiki and start building Connotea integration as a separate Firefox extension that would piggyback off of Zotero without having to edit a line of Zotero code.

On that note, and w/r/t the discussions that were raised over the weekend, let me just say that we spend a good chunk of today sketching out ideas, and by tomorrow we should have a solid policy on access to both our code repository and ticketing system...please just bear with us until then...

Best,

Josh

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Lund, Ben" <b.l...@nature.com>

On 16/10/06 13:11, "Josh Greenberg" <jgre...@gmu.edu> wrote:

Short answer: love the idea, and it fits well with our

intentions...we're much less interested in building a

monolithic silo than in a more open platform for notes/

Excellent!

bibliographies, etc. The one thing that concerns me is the question

of data model compatibility - for example, it looks like the way you

and we handle tags could be compatible, but the way Zotero deals with

notes and the "related" functionality probably doesn't map onto

Connotea well (and that's leaving aside the more nuanced ways that

we're storing things like authors/contributors/dates in citations vs.

how you might be doing so).

There will almost certainly be some incompatibilities, but I think we should

be able to find a minimum set of interoperable features that are still

useful.  And, of course, we can always change things on either end to enable

deeper integration.

Anyhow, the fact that you've got a Javascript API wrapper is

fantastic, and I'm definitely eager to get this up and running

quickly (and, your volunteering to do the heavy lifting is *much*

appreciated).

My Javascript wrapper is here:

http://developers.connotea.org/repository/notea/content/cwapi.js

It's released as part of our own (extremely alpha version) Firefox Extension

for Connotea, Notea (http://www.connotea.org/wiki/Notea).  Notea itself is

just a proof-of-concept thing right now, but is not intended to be a

competitor to Zotero anyway (as I think I mentioned to Dan when I first

contacted him).

You should be able to take that code and use it pretty much as it is.  I'm

not sure how much more heavy lifting than that I'll be able to do right now,

but I'll help where I can.  (Feel free to look through the rest of the Notea

code -- the notea_bookmark_in_connotea function in utils.js should help).

So, I guess the place to start is with the question of exactly what

kind of integration you're envisioning; are you thinking of a

periodic sync, or a more-or-less realtime integration (i.e. when you

add something to Zotero, a copy of the data gets pinged to

Connotea...I'm not sure how the reverse would work, though)? What

other ideas did you have?

I was thinking that starting with the simplest thing would be best.  You can

advise on what that is, but I suspect it might be:

 * Bookmark article in Connotea when something is added to Zotero (and

edited / deleted) => one-way integration

Doing a reverse synch would be cool too, although I'm not sure how that

would work. In principle it could be something like:

 * user choses a Connotea username / tag

 * Zotero fetches that list of articles from Connotea

 * Zotero iteerates over the list, adding them to the collection, and using

the tags / citation data from Connotea where appropriate

That sounds very much like a second phase

Ta,

Ben

[Marcus P S]

I am definetly look into the Notea code, and into the possibility of a
local store for Connotea data that can be synched with the server. I
have always wished for something like that for del.icio.us as well, and
it would be great if Zotero can provide this functionality -- although
I think I'd like to somehow separate the two, since I think the general
use of Connotea is for research, while del.icio.us is more widely used
just for web pages, and not for scholarly work.

I really have to think how a synch between Zotero and anything else
would work. I have the feeling that it would require some tweaking of
the Connotea HTTP API, as well as del.icio.us or whatever else, to
efficiently request all updated entries since the last synch, or since
some date, but I think it is doable.