Developers

Docear 1.1.1 Beta with Academic Search Feature

As you may know, Docear features a recommender system for academic literature. To find out which papers you might be interested in, the recommender system parses your mind maps and compares them to our digital library with currently about 1.8 million academic articles. While this is helpful and might point you to papers relevant for your general research goals, you will sometimes have to find information on a specific topic and hence search directly.

Based on our knowledge about recommender systems and some user requests, we decided to implement a direct search feature on our digital library. I am very grateful to Keystone, who supported me in visiting Dr. Georgia Kapitsaki at the University of Cyprus (UCY) in Nicosia for a full month to work on this idea. Dr. Kapitsaki’s has already supported us in our work on Docear’s recommender system in July 2013. Her knowledge about the inner mechanics and her ideas on the the search engine were essential for the implementation and the research part of the project.

How to use it

You can access the search feature from Docear’s ribbon bar (“Search and Filter > Documents > Online search”) or by double-clicking the “Online search” entry in Docear’s workspace panel. Since both the recommender system and the personalized search engine make use of your mind maps. you need to enable the recommendation service in Docear.

Screenshot from 2014-07-07 15:19:39

After opening the search page, you will see

  • a text box for your search query,
  • a “Search” button, and
  • several buttons below the text box reflecting search terms you might be interested in. If Docear does not have enough data to decide about your interests, this part remains empty.

Docear-online-search-interface

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By Joeran Beel, ago

Docear’s users donate $434 in two years (i.e. ~4 Cent per user)

As you probably know, Docear is free and open source. As you might know as well, we do accept donations. Today, we would like to share some statistics with you about the amount of donations we received. Actually, in the past two years, we received 434 US$ (~340€) from from 33 donators. That’s not a lot, given that Docear has several thousands of active users. However, it’s also no surprise and to be honest, we ourselves hardly ever donate for other software tools, so we cannot blame anyone for not donating to Docear (even if he should heavily use it).

The average donation we received was 13.16$ (median was 10$), the highest donation was 50$, the smallest 1$, standard deviation 11.04$. The following chart shows the individual and cumulated donations. Sometimes, we don’t receive any recommendations for several month, sometimes we get multiple ones within a week or so.

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By Joeran Beel, ago

Who wants to develop Docear4LibreOffice or Docear4OpenOffice?

Docear4LibreOffice and Docear4OpenOfficeA few months ago we released Docear4Word. Docear4Word is an add-on for Microsoft Word that allows you to insert and format citations and bibliographies very easily in MS Word. Many of our users love Docear4Word. However, not all of our users are using Microsoft Word but many are using OpenOffice or LibreOffice. One of them is Stephen from Uberstudent which is a Linux distribution for learners. Stephen, as many others, urged us to develop an add-on, comparable to Docear4Word, for Libre of OpenOffice. Unfortunately, we don’t have the expertise to do this.

Therefore, we would like you to help us. Do you have experience in developing add-ons for LibreOffice and/or OpenOffice? Then, please contact us. We have prepared a description of what Docear4Libre/OpenOffice should be able to do. Read it carefully, and tell us how long you would need to implement it. And don’t forget to tell us how much money you would want for it. Exactly, we are not expecting you to do it for free. We would be willing to pay something for it. Once we found an appropriate developer we will ask our users to donate for Docear4Libre/OpenOffice and give a good amount ourselves. Also Stephen will ask the users from Uberstudent to donate.

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By Joeran Beel, ago

Docear welcomes Georgia M. Kapitsaki, a visiting researcher from Cyprus, who will be supporting us with our recommender system

Yesterday we welcomed Dr. Georgia M. Kapitsaki here in our main office in Magdeburg, Germany. Georgia is from the University of Cyprus and will stay one month with us. Her main interest lies in our research-paper recommender system and she will support us in improving our recommender system and performing some research. We Read more…

By Joeran Beel, ago

We offer a paid internship for Bachelor students from Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain

We are glad to announce that we, again, will offer a paid internship in cooperation with the German Academic Exchange service (DAAD). If you are an undergraduate student, interested in software engineering or statistics, and coming from the Greece, Italy, Portugal, or Spain, get yourself started and do an 8-12 weeks internship in summer or autumn 2013, fully paid. And if you are not applicable to apply for the internship – please tell your friends to apply! 🙂

Your project

Your research question to answer will be “How to provide (better) research paper recommendations to our users?”. As such, it will be your task to support the Docear team in researching how the interests of Docear’s users can be identified from the users’ mind maps and how these interests can be matched with interesting items to recommend. You will do literature research, create new ideas, analyze user data, and implement new recommendation approaches in JAVA. Of course, you don’t have to do all of this alone – you will be closely cooperating with the Docear team. Your work will be integrated into Docear and used by thousands of researchers around the world. If your work is outstanding, we will write a research paper with you.

Requirements

You should have a profound knowledge of the programming language JAVA. Knowledge in statistics, machine learning, other programming languages (especially C/++ or Python) and/or MySQL, neo4j, Hibernate, Jersey, REST Web Services, Tomcat, and Apache is a plus, but not a requirement. Of course, we would appreciate if you spoke German but it would be no problem if you only spoke English. We would prefer, if you apply for a long internship (12 weeks) but you can also apply for a shorter internship. If you are interested in combining your internship with writing a Bachelor thesis, please let us know in advance (this would be highly welcome). You can start at any date you want in summer or autumn 2013.

Important: If you don’t want to program but have profound knowledge in statistics you are also very welcome to apply. In this case you will support us evaluating how good our current recommender system is, and you will help us generating ideas for improvements. Please indicate in your application clearly that you are not interested in software development but in statistics.

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By Joeran Beel, ago

Bachelor students: Do a paid internship in software engineering or statistics here at Docear

We are glad to announce that we, again, will offer a paid internship in cooperation with the German Academic Exchange service (DAAD). If you are an undergraduate student, interested in software engineering or statistics, and coming from the US, UK or Canada, get yourself started and do an 8-12 weeks internship in summer or autumn 2013, fully paid. And if you are not applicable to apply for the internship – please tell your friends to apply! 🙂

Your project

Your research question to answer will be “How to provide (better) research paper recommendations to our users?”. As such, it will be your task to support the Docear team in researching how the interests of Docear’s users can be identified from the users’ mind maps and how these interests can be matched with interesting items to recommend. You will do literature research, create new ideas, analyze user data, and implement new recommendation approaches in JAVA. Of course, you don’t have to do all of this alone – you will be closely cooperating with the Docear team. Your work will be integrated into Docear and used by thousands of researchers around the world. If your work is outstanding, we will write a research paper with you.

Requirements

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By Joeran Beel, ago

The second Freeplane/Docear Developer Conference: User Friendliness, Collaboration and Scripting

Last year in July we met the core developers of the mind mapping software Freeplane in Munich (Docear’s mind mapping component is based on Freeplane). At that meeting we decided that Freeplane and Docear would closely cooperate. Now, more than a year later it was time to meet again and discuss the next big steps in the development of Freeplane and Docear. So we met this weekend in Magdeburg, Docear’s “headquarter”. And while last year six people attended the meeting, this year we were nine participants (three from Docear, three from Freeplane and three students from HTW Berlin) plus one Freeplane developer attending via video. In the following I would like to provide a brief overview of the discussed topics and results.

The Freeplane and Docear team in Docear's office

The Freeplane and Docear team in Docear’s office in Magdeburg (Germany)

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By Joeran Beel, ago