Use cases

This page gives a brief overview of some typical bibliographic scenarios:

Search for bibliographic entries

A common scenario is that a researcher is working on a publication and is citing another paper. He knows the author and the title of the paper and wants to get the BibTeX entry for his own bibliographic database. He does not want to retype the complete data by hand because he wants to save time and avoid misspellings. Therefore his query could be:

• I am searching for the BibTeX entry for the book "Computer Networks" which was written by Andrew Tanenbaum.

Another possible scenario is that a researcher attended a conference, e.g. the IEEE P2P Conference 2003. There is a special peer sharing all bibliographic entries for the documents published on this conference. The researcher is now interested in receiving all information from this peer. A possible query could be:

• I am looking for all bibliographic entries from documents published on the IEEE P2P Conference 2003 offered by the conference peer.

The entries could also include an URL which can be used to receive the corresponding document from a specific location.

Often users search for documents on topics which are new to them. They neither have clear ideas which documents exist nor which authors published information on those topics. A typical query for this scenario could be:

• I am searching for documents about peer-to-peer technologies.

As a result a user is expecting documents concerning peer-to-peer technologies. In addition, he also gets to know which peer offers this information. It is also possible to directly contact this peer to receive detailed information on the required topic.

Another potential scenario is that a person is searching for related material about a special topic. For instance, he might know about peer-to-peer networks but now wants to get information on related research areas like network routing or internet address protocols. A possible request to the system could be:

• I am searching for topics related to peer-to-peer technologies.

Sharing information

A possible scenario for sharing information is a meeting of a researcher and a student. The researcher is telling the student about a special topic, e.g. peer-to-peer technologies. The student does not have any knowledge about this area and wants to get detailed information in terms of publications. The researcher can now share his information with other peers, and the student can search for it through the network. He restricts his search on the researcher's peer. A common query for this task could be:

• I am searching information about peer peer-to-peer technologies on the researcher's peer

Editing

A typical scenario for a researcher is that he wants to add a publication to his bibliographic data. This may be difficult for him because he organizes his data in several files and different file formats. There are also several versions of the same bibliographic file on his computer. Inserting new entries may be time consuming because, first of all, the corresponding bibliographic file has to be found. If he wants to add his new entry into more than one file he has to check several files. It would be a benefit for the researcher to own a tool which organizes the content of all these files.

A difficulty in editing bibliographic data is that manually inserted entries may be fault prone. However by using a peer-to-peer network in the background the entry may be validated by other peers who have similar entries in their repository. An error message could show up to the researcher to tell him that there might be a mistake in his entry.

Furthermore if a researcher is inserting new entries he oftentimes has not all relevant information about a special publication. It could be possible to search for similar entries in the network and to complete the missing data.