Thursday, March 09, 2006
Forthcoming features
I've been busy fixing bugs for the last wee while (with much help). The next fortnight, however, should see the introduction of a couple of new features. I'll discuss a few of them below.
The first new feature is "watchlists". The idea is that you can set up a list of papers - you can get Postgenomic to import your data from Connotea and some types of citation manager, which should make things easier - and then select which ones you want to keep an eye on. If a paper gets cited or reviewed by a blog, or its record on Postgenomic gets updated in some other fashion (it's reviewed by the Faculty of 1000, for example) then we'll inform you by email or RSS.
You could use it to keep track of discussions involving a paper you or your lab had a hand in.
The second new feature is clustering of news stories. Quite often the same popular story will have more than one link in the top 50 - ten people might blog it, but five will link to one newspaper reports and five to another. Clustering should pull everything together. We're using Stijn Van Dongen's excellent Markov Clustering Algorithm (MCL), which amongst other things is also used to cluster protein sequences into the protein families you see on Ensembl.
The third new feature is an API which will let you use Postgenomic content on your own blog and in your own scripts. Use the data any way you see fit (bearing in mind the rights of the original authors).
Things that are still in the planning stages include conference reports (how should they be collected?) and browser plugins / extensions (if you have any experience of writing these and fancy contributing to Postgenomic, please get in touch) so that users can read any feedback on papers as they come across them on the web.
Happy browsing.
The first new feature is "watchlists". The idea is that you can set up a list of papers - you can get Postgenomic to import your data from Connotea and some types of citation manager, which should make things easier - and then select which ones you want to keep an eye on. If a paper gets cited or reviewed by a blog, or its record on Postgenomic gets updated in some other fashion (it's reviewed by the Faculty of 1000, for example) then we'll inform you by email or RSS.
You could use it to keep track of discussions involving a paper you or your lab had a hand in.
The second new feature is clustering of news stories. Quite often the same popular story will have more than one link in the top 50 - ten people might blog it, but five will link to one newspaper reports and five to another. Clustering should pull everything together. We're using Stijn Van Dongen's excellent Markov Clustering Algorithm (MCL), which amongst other things is also used to cluster protein sequences into the protein families you see on Ensembl.
The third new feature is an API which will let you use Postgenomic content on your own blog and in your own scripts. Use the data any way you see fit (bearing in mind the rights of the original authors).
Things that are still in the planning stages include conference reports (how should they be collected?) and browser plugins / extensions (if you have any experience of writing these and fancy contributing to Postgenomic, please get in touch) so that users can read any feedback on papers as they come across them on the web.
Happy browsing.
