Survlog: A Blog System for Literature Surveys

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Survlog A Blog System for Literature Surveys

• Kenta Hattori, Masanori Matsumoto, and Hiromichi
  Goto
• Advisor Prof. Mary Inaba
• EP Kazuki Yoshida
• Graduate School of Information Science and
  Technology,
• The University of Tokyo

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Survey Workflow

• Survey is very important for most
• researchers, students, engineers,
• Search related papers
• Download from Internet
• Save into some folder
• Goto 1 or Read it
• Log comments
• Goto 1

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Problems

• We cannot
• see title/author of papers
• check which papers have been read or not
• attach memo/comment to papers
• classify papers well ? a.k.a. Bat problem

store papers in each folders
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We want to

• See information about papers easily
• Record impression or comment on papers
• Arrange and classify them flexibly
• And more
• Never give up easily(no ???? in Japanese)
• Share information among other researchers
• To sum up,
• Some tool that makes our research life happy!

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We propose Survlog

• A daily tool for researchers
• A web application to log and share comments on
  papers
• Implemented with the Ruby on Rails

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Survlog Features

• Read/Unread paper management
• ? A list of papers to be read
• Write/Read comments on papers
• ? Refer other researchers helpful comments
• Hierarchical tag trees
• ? Arrange and classify papers flexibly
• Import data from external sites
• ? Reduce tedious work in data input

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Other features

• Upload and attach files to papers
• Set comment/tag to public/private
• Display reference links of papers
• Search registered papers by tag/keyword
• Export/import data in BibTeX style format

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Main view of Survlog
Display a list of read/unread papers
individually
Hierarchical tag structures help you to classify
items flexibly
Log your comments on a paper
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Hierarchical tag trees
Communication
RPC
Socket
model
Paper
P2P
Client/Server
Language
Conference
Journal
Thesis
Functional
Concurrent
OOP
IEEE
ACM
C
Haskell
ML
Erlang
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Import from external sites

• Data input is tedious work
• Title, authors, publisher, date, volume, number,
  page,

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Import from external sites
Import Literature
Easy import literature information into DB by URL

• Survlog currently supports
• http//portal.acm.org
• http//citeseer.ist.psu.edu

Register New Literature
Input automatically reference data automatically
input
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Plug-in for data import

• Easy to add plug-in
• Just put a Ruby plug-in file in lib/importers/
• Name the file such as like portal.acm.org.rb
• How to write plug-in

URL of the external site
Importer.register do uri parse received
HTML text set following record
bibtex_text gt BibTeX format text,
references gt reference list end
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Using Ruby on Rails

• Ruby on Rails(RoR) is one of most popular web
  application frameworks.
• RoR takes care of most routine work
• Only 1.2 kLoC of Ruby program we wrote
• But, we also feel some problems
• Was Difficult to implement non-standard features
• Hierarchical tag, import BibTeX data,
• Difficult to debug
• Because RoR uses a lot of tricky code internally

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Future work

• You can access and use Survlog from
• http//survlog.org
• Now, Japanese version only
• Fix a few unknown bugs
• Make user interface more useful/refined
• Support more external sites
• Performance tuning
• Internationalization?

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Related Work

• Survey Index (in Japanese)
• http//www.spa.is.uec.ac.jp/kinuko/survey/
• Survlog is very inspired by this site
• CiteULike
• A free online service to organise your academic
  papers
• http//www.citeulike.org/
• Partikle (in Japanese)
• Participatory ARTICLE organizing service
• http//partikle.csc.nii.ac.jp

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Thank you