Features
From AigaionWiki
In this short chapter, the main functionalities of Aigaion are presented. We first describe our vision on what Aigaion is and will then go in to some detail on the key Aigaion functionalities.
Contents |
Overall Vision
Both for individual researchers as for research groups or projects, it is of major importance to organize the literature one has read. A well organized bibliography is a powerful instrument. It speeds up the search for publications one has already read and supports the user in structuring information. Aigaion provides a bibliography management environment that supports a user in just this: Organizing and managing a complete bibliography, from small personal bibliographies to bibliographies for e.g. a complete research department.
Aigaion is a shared, annotated bibliography manager. In the following sections we will elaborate a bit on the functionality of each of these characteristics.
Bibliography management
As the first point, we have the bibliography management part of Aigaion, i.e. maintaining a database with information about bibliographic entries. We think that the most important features a bibliography manager should have are:
- Ease of operation.
- Useful data import and export possibilities.
- Support user in having a consistent database.
- Good publication search functions.
- Enable linking attachments (in- and external) to publications.
- Easy configuration for the site settings and for user preferences.
Bibliography annotation
A second central functionality of Aigaion has always been the annotation of the bibliographic information. This annotation can be both abstractive (summarizing content, pointing out distinctive features, etc ...) and critical (relevance to own work, what you see as good points or shortcomings of the work, etc ...).
Aigaion provides a customizable topic structure and the note facility for annotation. The topic structure allows one to define a hierarchy of topics of interest, where each publication can be assigned to any number of topics in this tree. The note facility allows one to add any number of annotation paragraphs to each individual publication.
Bibliography sharing
For research groups, managing publications is a big challenge. Every researcher has its own specialist areas but many documents will also be of general interests. Managing shared bibliographies has many extra demands on a bibliography manager. In our opinion, the most important ones are:
- Support for browsing only the relevant publications per user or per user group.
- Allow publishing part(s) of the database for anonymous guest users.
- Deal with copyright issues: Not all information may be shared with
- the group.
- with the world.
- Detailed rights management system on user and group level
Aigaion provides us with user administration and group support, allowing user preferences, both personal and shared topic structures, individual rights management and anonymous access to (part of) the information in the database. The access level mechanism forms a flexible way to determine which users (registered or guests) should have access to certain content.
Integration with other systems
A final major issue that we want to mention here is that many users want to be able to integrate Aigaion tighter with other systems they use. Examples are:
- Using the authentication from another application, and automatically creating users that exist in the other application but not in Aigaion (examples: Wikis, CMS, ...)
- Embedding Aigaion views in other web based applications
And the last feature from this list is still future work:
- Using Aigaion for a kind of cite-while-you-write plugin in word processors and wikis (Word, OpenOffice, etc)
What Aigaion is Not (or not very much)
We are not planning to make a bibliography formatting engine. This limits the amount of customizability of displays. We have options for displaying e.g. publication summaries in a different way when we think it makes the content easier to browse for some users (think for example of things like truncating long lists of authors with 'et al.'). We will not make a completely configurable formatting engine that allows one to cut and paste Aigaion displays in to a word processor, ready-formatted in whatever style required for the paper currently being written. However, it is extremely simple to find the right view files and adapt them to customize your displays to your heart's desire, or to write your own OSBib formatters.