Zotero

Zotero is a Mozilla/Firefox plug-in, open source (BSD-like license) found at http://www.zotero.org/ The application creates a button in the lower right corner of a browser which, when clicked, opens a window:

Three columns are present in the window: a left, center, and right column. The left column facilitates management of collections and querying them through tag-based search. The middle column represents the entire collection, as filtered through tag-based queries. The right column provides five tabs:

• Info—where an information resources identity and other metadata is captured
• Notes—where personal notes can be captured
• Attachments—where the following activities are facilitated
• Link to a selected file
• Store a selected file—which has the behavior of adding a selected file to the collection in the context (indented) of the viewed resource
• Store a link to the currently-viewed Web page—which has the behavior of adding a link to the Web page in the context (indented) of the viewed resource
• Save a snapshot of the current Web page
• Tags—where the user adds personal tags to the resource. When Zotero is asked to archive a Web page, it will look for tags to add according to metadata it finds. Thus, some resources may have tags created by Zotero as well as those created by the user.
• Related—Users are prompted to select items from the collections that are deemed to be related to the viewed resource in some way.
  

Additional functions include navigating directly to a selected resource, which may be a file on disk, or a Web page.

Zotero is open source with a BSD-like license; from our present vantage point, it appears to be an ideal platform on which to build a browser-based desktop knowledge garden application. Future research along the dimension of extending Zotero might include the following topics:

• Synchronization to/from a knowledge garden portal for public artifacts
• Integration with other tools such as dialogue mapping, and connecting—where connecting would extend or replace Zotero’s Related tab with one that behaves more like Cohere or Fuzzzy
• Integration with email clients in order to bring email directly into the sensemaking tools mix
• Integration with desktop platforms that offer harvesting tools to extend Zotero’s file capabilities
  

AndyStreich:  having been a Zotero user now for all of a day, I think this is, as Jack says, a great example of a useful tool and something we should consider building on.  Zotero has built-in knowledge about certain kinds of web pages and can harvest authorship and bibliographic information from them.  Delivering this kind of functionality as a browser plugin is just brilliant.