Feeding TEL:
Building an Ecosystem Around BuRST
to Convey Publication Metadata
Peter Kraker1, Angela Fessl1, Patrick Hoefler1 and Stefanie Lindstaedt1
1
Know-Center Graz, Inffeldgasse 21a,
8010 Graz, Austria
{pkraker, afessl, phoefler, slind}@know-center.at
Abstract. In this paper we present an ecosystem for the lightweight exchange
of publication metadata based on the principles of Web 2.0. At the heart of this
ecosystem, semantically enriched RSS feeds are used for dissemination. These
feeds are complemented by services for creation and aggregation, as well as
widgets for retrieval and visualization of publication metadata. In two
scenarios, we show how these publication feeds can benefit institutions,
researchers, and the TEL community. We then present the formats, services,
and widgets developed for the bootstrapping of the ecosystem. We conclude
with an outline of the integration of publication feeds with the STELLAR
Network of Excellence1 and an outlook on future developments.
Keywords: science 2.0, web 2.0, mashups, services, widgets, feeds
1 Introduction
Recently, developments under the paradigm of Science 2.0 have received a lot of
attention [1]. Researchers are embracing the capabilities of Web 2.0 tools and
technologies, such as blogs, wikis, and social networking sites, to support their
research. Using Web 2.0 for scientific work has numerous potential advantages: it
possibly leads to shorter feedback cycles, enhances the communication between
researchers, and yields a higher penetration of ideas. One of the prerequisites for the
introduction of a modern Science 2.0 in the field of Technology Enhanced Learning is
the wide-spread access to resources, data, and publications for the whole community
[2].
In this paper we present an ecosystem for the exchange of publication data based
on existing Web 2.0 infrastructure. At the heart of this ecosystem, semantically
enriched feeds based on the popular RSS format [3] are used as a means for
lightweight exchange of information on the web. They can easily be combined,
aggregated, visualized, and republished. Hence, publication feeds have the advantage

1
STELLAR [4] is an EU-funded Network of Excellence, which aims at unifying the diverse
community in the field of Technology Enhanced Learning in Europe.

2 Peter Kraker, Angela Fessl, Patrick Höfler and Stefanie Lindstaedt
to provide important scientific data in a format widely used by existing Web 2.0
infrastructure.
To facilitate the opening of institutional archives, easy-to-use tools are needed.
Web services are especially apt for this, since they are the cornerstone of Web 2.0,
allowing for loosely coupled systems and simple syndication [3]. Whereas the
services aid the producer in generating a publication feed, widgets let the recipient
consume and manipulate these feeds. Users can collectively contribute to the data
base by adding their own feeds; they can help identify good publications by rating
them, and interact with each other by leaving comments. A visualization widget
provides them with filtering and searching facilities for the aggregated data.
This paper consists of three sections. At first, we introduce two scenarios for the
usage of publication feeds in research from a personal and an organizational
perspective. Then, we present the pillars of the ecosystem, namely the adapted
BuRST format, a suite of web services for feed producers, and several widgets for
feed consumers. Finally, we conclude with an overview of the integration of the
ecosystem into the STELLAR Network of Excellence and an outlook on future
developments.
2 Scenario
In the following section we present two scenarios which illustrate the benefits of
the presented ecosystem. These scenarios emphasize on lightweight dissemination,
visualization, and navigation of semantically-enriched scientific publication feeds in
the style of Web 2.0.
2.1 Scenario 1: Semi-automated dissemination of publication feeds
Sandra is a supervisor at a TEL research institution dedicated to professional
learning. She is responsible for collecting the publications of her group. Therefore,
her assistants keep a BibTeX file of their publication metadata, which is periodically
uploaded to a common server. Sandra is interested in a wider dissemination of this
data, but unfortunately she cannot get her assistants to enter the publication data over
and over again into other repositories. Hence, she is looking for a way to automate
dissemination. Since publication data is already available in several BibTex files, she
uses a dedicated BibTeX converter to convert these files into publication feeds. The
resulting individual feeds are then merged into a single feed with the help of the
Publication Feed Merger. Due to the fact that there are also publications not related to
TEL in the feed, a Publication Feed Filter is applied. Sandra now publishes this feed
so that all interested parties that support the BuRST format can subscribe to it.

Feeding TEL: Building an Ecosystem Around BuRST
to Convey Publication Metadata 3
2.2 Scenario 2: Explorative research on publication feeds
Kurt is an early-career researcher interested in professional learning. He wants to
find out about the most influential publications and recently trending topics.
Therefore, he joins a special interest group dedicated to professional learning on a
social networking platform. Sandra and other users have already added their
institutions' publication feeds to this group. The individual publications are presented
as blog posts, which can be rated and commented on. Kurt now has an overview of
the top rated publications and the discussions revolving around them. Next, he opens
the "Publication Visualization" widget from within the special interest group. He is
presented with a faceted browsing view containing all publication metadata from the
feeds. A tag cloud aggregated from the keywords is additionally shown to Kurt. He
then restricts the data to certain years to see the changes in the tag cloud. This allows
him to reflect on the trending topics.
3 Publication Feed Ecosystem
In this section, we present the three initial pillars of the publication feed ecosystem:
the adapted BuRST format, a suite of web services for feed producers, and several
widgets for feed consumers.
3.1 Publication Feeds
Publication feeds are RSS 1.0 feeds, enhanced with elements from the SWRC2 and
DC3 ontologies. These feeds are an adaption of the BuRST4 format, proposed by Peter
Mika [5]. The bases for BuRST [6] are RSS 1.0 [2], RDF [7], DC 1.1 [8], and SWRC
0.3 [9]. Modifications were applied where the format was outdated or underspecified.
It is, for example, not possible to express affiliation in FOAF5 other than by providing
the URL of the institution. As this is not always feasible, the affiliation attribute of
SWRC is suggested to represent this data in free text. A complete reference of the
publication feed format can be found at [10].
See below for an exemplified item representation. The item is divided into two
parts:
1. A native RSS part
2. A RDF extension part (highlighted in grey)
Both parts are linked through the burst:publication property. Information given in
the RSS part of the item is mainly intended for display purposes (e.g. in RSS feed
readers or widgets), and for processing in other tools which can deal with RSS (e.g.

2
Semantic Web for Research Communities
3
Dublin Core
4
Bibliography Management using RSS Technology
5
Friend of a Friend

4 Peter Kraker, Angela Fessl, Patrick Höfler and Stefanie Lindstaedt
Yahoo! Pipes). The RDF extension part describes the publication in a semantically
much more sophisticated way. This part is intended for tools and services that are able
to process and display BuRST feeds (see sections 3.2 and 3.3), as well as semantic
web applications that understand RDF.
Example of a publication represented in a BuRST feed.
<item rdf:about="http://know-center.tugraz.at/papers/16"
xml:lang="en">
<title>A Storyboard of the APOSDLE Vision</title>
<link>http://www.aposdle.tugraz.at/content/download/288/1411/file/l
indstaedt_mayer_APOSDLE_poster_p.pdf</link>
<description>Lindstaedt, S. N., Mayer, H. (2006): A Storyboard of
the APOSDLE Vision.</description>
<dc:date>2009-10-27T14:40:18+01:00</dc:date>
<burst:publication>
<swrc:InProceedings>
<swrc:title>A Storyboard of the APOSDLE Vision</swrc:title>
<swrc:author>
<swrc:Person>
<swrc:name>Lindstaedt, Stefanie N.</swrc:name>
</swrc:Person>
</swrc:author>
<swrc:author>
<swrc:Person>
<swrc:name>Mayer, Harald</swrc:name>
</swrc:Person>
</swrc:author>
<swrc:booktitle>Proceedings of the First European Conference
on Technology Enhanced Learning</swrc:booktitle>
<swrc:year>2006</swrc:year>
<swrc:month>10</swrc:month>
</swrc:InProceedings>
</burst:publication>
</item>

The publication feed format serves two purposes: firstly, it can be understood by
existing Web 2.0 infrastructure, which is capable of processing and visualizing RSS
feeds. Secondly, it has the expressive power of RDF to describe publication metadata
and to link entities through URIs. The example given contains a minimum set of
attributes, especially addressing the "what?", "who?", "where?", and "when?". The
available vocabulary is much larger, because the whole SWRC ontology can be used
to markup publication metadata.

Feeding TEL: Building an Ecosystem Around BuRST
to Convey Publication Metadata 5
3.2 Publisher Services
The Publication Feed Publisher Services are a suite of helper services aiding
individuals as well as institutions in producing, aggregating, and refining publication
feeds. Services are one of the cornerstones of Web 2.0, allowing for loosely coupled
systems and simple syndication [3]. The publisher services were designed according
to the needs of institutions as described in scenario 1. At the moment there are three
services available (via [11]):
1. The BibTex Converter translates BibTex to the publication feed format. It takes
any BibTex file as input and converts it into a publication feed. Optionally, certain
other metadata can be set, e.g. the publisher of the feed.
2. The Publication Feed Merger combines two or more publication feeds and merges
duplicate items, if they have the same URI. It takes two or more publication feeds
as input and provides a single publication feed as output.
3. The Publication Feed Filter selects relevant publications from a feed, according to
a given taxonomy. It follows the "filter in" approach, which means that all
publications containing one or more keywords in the taxonomy are included in the
filtered feed. The Publication Feed Filter takes a publication feed and a taxonomy
file as input and returns a filtered publication feed.
All publisher services were written in PHP. They are free for everyone to use, and
there is no registration or API key required. To help with the orchestration of these
services, a DERI Pipes [12] Installation is available at [13], along with a frontend to
the BibTex converter [14].
3.3 Subscriber Widgets
The Publication Feed Subscriber Widgets are a suite of widgets for the
visualization of and the interaction with publication feeds. They were designed
according to the needs of researchers described in scenario 2. Specifically there are
two widgets already implemented:
1. The Publication Feed Integration Widget was designed as a plugin to the social
networking platform system Elgg [15]. It is based on Blogextend [16] and the
Simplepie RSS Feed Integrator [17]. The widget allows members of an Elgg
platform adding publication feeds to groups. The publications contained in these
feeds can be accessed via a common group blog. As pictured in Figure 1,
individual publications are being visualized as blog post entries. Users are able to
rate each publication and engage in discussions with each other by posting
comments.
2. The Publication Feed Visualization Widget is available as a native Elgg widget and
in a Wookie [18] version. It visualizes publication feed items in a faceted browser
view based on Simile [19]. The faceted browser allows for filtering the publication
feeds along the following dimensions: authors, publication years, and keywords.
These filtering mechanisms are complemented with a full text search. Furthermore,
a timeline visualization orders publications chronologically and allows users to

6 Peter Kraker, Angela Fessl, Patrick Höfler and Stefanie Lindstaedt
intuitively browse through them. A tag cloud helps with detecting the most
important keywords for a given collection of publications.

Fig. 1. Rating and commenting features of the Publication Feed Integration Widget
4 Integration into the STELLAR Network of Excellence
The publication feed ecosystem is being integrated with the STELLAR Network of
Excellence. See Figure 2 for an overview of the proposed concept.
As a first step, all partners within STELLAR are asked to produce a publication
feed. In the process, they are able to use the publisher services described in section
3.2 to generate their feeds. The published feeds are in turn being used to update the
STELLAR Open Archive (SOA) [20], an open access platform dedicated to collecting
and distributing TEL-related publications as well as the accompanying metadata.
Therefore, the SOA subscribes to all of the feeds generated by the partners. The SOA
is not only an archive, but it also acts as an aggregator of feeds, allowing to export all
or parts of the collected publications as publication feeds. As shown in Figure 2, other
tools, which are able to process RSS (such as feed readers) are able to subscribe to the
publication feeds as well.
At the same time, the subscriber widgets described in section 3.3 are being
deployed to TEL Europe. TEL Europe [21] is a social networking platform based on
Elgg for all stakeholders in Technology Enhanced Learning in Europe, operated by
STELLAR. With these widgets, users on TEL Europe are able to add relevant
publications to a group in subscribing to any publication feed. The feeds might be

Feeding TEL: Building an Ecosystem Around BuRST
to Convey Publication Metadata 7
coming from the SOA, from individual partner institutions, or indeed from any
publisher of such a feed (e.g. a special interest group). The members of the group are
then able to start a discussion around particular publications, and they may also add a
rating. Additionally, they can visualize all feeds available on the platform for search,
exploration, and trend scouting.


Fig. 2. Overview of the integration of the ecosystem in STELLAR
5 Conclusion and Outlook
In this paper, we presented an ecosystem for the lightweight exchange of
publication metadata contributing to the prerequisites for a modern Science 2.0. In
two scenarios, we showed how publication feeds can benefit researchers, institutions,
and the TEL community. We described the main building blocks of the ecosystem,
being (1) the feed format, (2) publisher services, and (3) subscriber widgets. Lastly,
we outlined the adoption of the ecosystem by the STELLAR Network of Excellence.
The adoption process has not been finished yet, but the first results are promising.
Four partners in STELLAR are actively developing BuRST feeds. Some of them have

8 Peter Kraker, Angela Fessl, Patrick Höfler and Stefanie Lindstaedt
already been submitted to the STELLAR Open Archive which recently experienced a
boost in the number of publications to 10386. The two subscriber widgets have been
deployed to TEL Europe and the first special interest groups are starting to use them.
There are certain challenges regarding the publication feeds, which have not been
explicitly addressed in the first version. To begin with, URIs for authors and
institutions would help to manage the entities in the network, and to detect duplicates.
Also, the vocabulary of SWRC could be enhanced to include more metadata. Finally,
we are thinking about ways of how to combine the data from the publication feeds
with social networking data. This would give a more coherent picture of what authors
have published and what their research interests are.
Due to its decentralized architecture, the publication feed ecosystem can be
extended by anyone. In the future, we expect to see other interested parties
contributing their own components. This openness helps making the ecosystem
adaptable by other research communities and is a precondition for its sustainable
future.
6 Acknowledgement
This work was carried out as part of the STELLAR Network of Excellence, which
is funded by the European Commission (grant agreement no. 231913). This
contribution is partly funded by the Know-Center, which is funded within the
Austrian COMET program – Competence Centers for Excellent Technologies – under
the auspices of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation and
Technology, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Economy, Family and Youth, and the
State of Styria. COMET is managed by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency
FFG.
7 References
[1] Waldrop, M: Science 2.0 - Is Open Access Science the Future? Scientific American, 5
(298), 46-51 (2008).
[2] Kieslinger, B., Lindstaedt, S.N.: Science 2.0 Practices in the Field of Technology Enhanced
Learning. Science 2.0 for TEL Workshop, EC-TEL (2009).
[2] RDF Site Summary (RSS) 1.0, http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/spec
[3] O’Reilly, T.: What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next
Generation of Software. Online at http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html
(2005)
[4] STELLAR: The Network for Technology Enhanced Learning, http://www.stellarnet.eu/
[5] Mika, P., Klein, M. and Serban, R. 2005. Semantics-based Publication Management using
RSS and FOAF. Proceedings of the Poster Track, 4th International Semantic Web
Conference (ISWC 2005), November 2005, Galway, Ireland.

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Feeding TEL: Building an Ecosystem Around BuRST
to Convey Publication Metadata 9
[6] Mika, P.: Bibliography Management using RSS Technology (BuRST). Online at:
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~pmika/research/burst/BuRST.html (2005)
[7] RDF - Semantic Web Standards, http://www.w3.org/RDF/
[8] DCMI Metadata Terms, http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms
[9] SWRC Ontology v0.3, http://ontoware.org/swrc/swrc_v0.3.owl
[10] Publication feeds format 1.0, http://www.stellarnet.eu/d/6/3/Publication_feeds_
format_v1.0
[11] Publication Feeds Publisher Services, http://stellar.know-center.tugraz.at/services
[12] DERI Pipes: Open Source, Extendable, Embeddable Web Data Mashups,
http://pipes.deri.org/
[13] DERI Pipes@Know-Center, http://stellar.know-center.tugraz.at:8080/pipes/
[14] BibTeX to Publication Feed Converter, http://stellar.know-center.tugraz.at/html/
convert.php
[15] Elgg – Open Source Social Networking Engine, http://elgg.org/
[16] Blogextended, http://community.elgg.org/pg/plugins/antifm/read/230708/blogextended-
132
[17] SimplePie RSS Feed Integrator, http://community.elgg.org/pg/plugins/costelloc/read/
37480/simplepie-feed-integrator
[18] Apache Wookie, http://getwookie.org/
[19] SIMILE Widgets, http://www.simile-widgets.org/
[20] Stellar Open Archive, http://oa.stellarnet.eu/
[21] TEL Europe, http://www.teleurope.eu