Elsevier

Journal of Web Semantics

Volume 2, Issue 1, 1 December 2004, Pages 99-103
Journal of Web Semantics

Bibster—a semantics-based bibliographic Peer-to-Peer system

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.websem.2004.09.006Get rights and content

Abstract

This paper describes Bibster, a Peer-to-Peer system for exchanging bibliographic metadata among researchers. We show how Bibster exploits ontologies in data-representation, query formulation, query routing, and query result presentation. The Bibster system is freely available and is used by researchers across multiple organizations.

Introduction

In this paper, we describe the Bibster system1, an application of the use of semantics in Peer-to-Peer systems. Bibster is aimed at researchers that share bibliographic metadata. Currently, many researchers in computer science keep lists of bibliographic metadata in BibTeX format that they must laboriously maintain manually, for which they do not have an easy overview, and that has greatly varying quality. At the same time, many researchers are willing to share these resources, provided they do not have to invest work in doing so. The following characteristics make this scenario an interesting use case for a semantics-based Peer-to-Peer system. First, a centralized solution does not exist and cannot exist, because of the multitude of informal workshops that researchers refer to, but that do not show up in centralized resources, such as DBLP2. Second, the use of Semantic Web technology is crucial in this setting. Although a small common-core ontology of bibliographic information exists (title, author/editor, etc.), but much of this information is very volatile and users define arbitrary add-ons, like including URLs.

Ontologies are crucial throughout the usage of Bibster, viz., for importing data, formulating and routing queries, and processing answers. Fig. 1 shows how these steps are realized in the user interface of Bibster. The Scope widget allows for defining the targeted peers, the Search and Search Details widgets allow for keyword and semantic search; Results Table and BibTeXView widgets allow for browsing and re-using query results. In the following, we will describe the use of semantic methods in each of these steps. A detailed presentation of the architecture and methods of the Bibster system can be found in [1], [2].

Section snippets

Bibster architecture and modules

The Bibster system has been implemented as an instance of the SWAP System architecture as introduced in [1]. Fig. 2 shows a high-level design of the architecture of a single node in the Peer-to-Peer system. We will now briefly present the individual components as instantiated for the Bibster system.

The Communication Adapter is responsible for the network communication between peers. It serves as a transport layer for other parts of the system, for sending and forwarding queries. It hides and

Import and semantic representation of bibliographic metadata

Many researchers have accumulated extensive collections of BibTeX files for their bibliographic references. The Bibster system allows users to import their own bibliographic metadata into a local RDF repository. Bibliographic entries made available to Bibster by a user are automatically aligned to two common ontologies: The first ontology—the Semantic Web Research Community Ontology (SWRC3)—describes different generic aspects of

Evaluation and conclusion

The Bibster system is currently being evaluated by means of a public field experiment. The user actions and system events are continuously logged and analyzed to evaluate the user behavior and system performance. We have analyzed the results for a period of 1 month (June 2004) and we have obtained the following interesting results: 53 peers used the Bibster system and shared more than 33,000 bibliographic entries. Eight peers shared more than 1000 items each. The users performed a total of 700

Acknowledgments

Research reported in this paper has been partially financed by the EU in the IST Project SWAP (IST-2001-34103).

References (3)

  • M. Ehrig et al.

    The swap data and metadata model for semantics-based peer-to-peer systems

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