Got IT: Bibster, a Bibliographic P2P App

Clay Spinuzzi, whose reading list/review blog is among my frequent blog stops, points me to an application that might fill the need I talked about in the Amazon bib app entry.

Bibster, according to the excellent technical paper laying out the functionality and architecture of the application, is a much more robust platform for extracting and creating sharable bibliographic info than I was talking about. It's a pretty exciting manifestion of the heretofore abstract notion of the Semantic Web too.

Among the exciting things Bibster promises is a way to locate and understand the value of a given bibliographic source based on the way users of that source view it - and based on their expertise. This is interesting because it comes close to a model of the way a lot of us believe texts come to be valued, generally, through the social appropriation and representation of what they may mean.

I say "promises" because they haven't released any code yet. But when they do, I will have to try this out. I'll be interested to see if they stuck with the ACM Computing Classification System as their model for representing peer expertise, and how this will make the tool useful (or not) for someone like me who only lurks in the "soft" and dark recesses of that ontology.