Mendeley
Wednesday 7th May, 2008 @ 12:14 pm
I’ve recently left BT and joined a start-up called Mendeley. I’m now writing Qt code for a living which will hopefully benefit my KDE contribution’s quality and hopefully my work on KDE will benefit Mendeley. I’ve moved to London for the job, hence the decreased number of blog posts lately and my vanishing from the internet. I hope to get back to blogging and doing KDE work when the dust settles but let’s hear some more about what I’m doing.
Mendeley is providing a tool for managing academic and research knowledge, allowing people to be able to better find and manage academic papers and use a network of others to avoid mundane tasks when trying to seek academic knowledge. There will also be interesting benefits for those producing papers as well.
This consists of a desktop Qt application (for Windows/Mac/Linux and maybe other Qt supported platforms) which can plug into your Mendeley.com account and allows metadata to be gathered and shared. The desktop application and web application usage will remain free-as-in-beer but the desktop client will be (at least initially) proprietary.
We’re also looking for a talented PHP/Javascript developer with database experience (preferably MySQL) to join the team based in Central London. You will have a lot of responsibility from the beginning and must be passionate about the problems Mendeley are trying to solve and using social networks to solve them (*cough* Web 2.0! *cough*). You can read the full job advert on Mendeley’s site.
Although this may look like a blatant plug it’s also because I believe the sort of people that read a fairly technical blog like this may be more suitable for the position than on a random jobs board.
I’m enjoying Mendeley a lot so far. I’ve been able to make a real difference in my first two days and the other guys are great fun to work with and I look forward to learning more about academic research and Qt in the coming months!
Posted in My Life, Software Development
6 Comments »
This sounds really interesting. Actually it would fit perfectly with the whole Nepomuk idea. Now I do not know if you are doing open-source but I doubt it. In any case it would be interesting to see if Mendeley could be integrated with Nepomuk to let other desktop applications benefit from the Mendeley data and the other way around. After all you could reference the papers that were indexed by Mendeley in from other resources on the desktop. Imagine for example the good old project idea which means to create a project resource and let it have a bunch of people involved (related contacts), a bunch of files or emails (via the contacts and maybe some tags), and also papers and books that have been published in the project or are a “must-read”.
I would be very much interested to hear about your opinion on this.
Comment by Sebastian Trüg — Thursday 8th May, 2008 @ 7:29 am
Hi there,
after seeing your blog entry on http://planetkde.org/ I got quite excited about Mendeley. Actually I am doing a PhD in physics at Technische Universität München and I am writing up my thesis at the time being. So obviuosly I reading a lot of scientific articles at the moment and it is getting harder with each day to keep everything well organized. I think Mendeley will be a great way to do this as far as I have seen from the video on the website.
However, I have one question to ask, that immediately came to my mind, when I saw the feature announcement on the Mendeley website: Will it have LaTeX/BibTeX support? This would be the absolute killer feature for me. And I think for many scientist out there as well, as LaTeX is still the prefered tool (at least for physicists) in order to write an article, manuscript or even book as it just layouts everything so beautiful! Especially generating a bibtex file from the Mendeley database will be peace of cake…
Thanks for working on such a beautiful project. Keep on going!
P.S. There is any way that I can an invitation code for the beta testing apart from entering my contact details on the website (what I already did…) ? I am really enthusiastic about this project and would like to help.
Comment by marc — Thursday 8th May, 2008 @ 8:48 am
@Sebastian: The client itself won’t be open-source (to begin with anyway) but the data will (eventually) be available to clients using an web-based interface. I’ve been working here three days and have been pretty busy already so not sure of the exact details but I’ve made a note and will contact you when I get more details. I’d be up for trying to get some integration between KDE and Mendeley, perhaps we could provide a DBUS interface, would that be convenient?
@marc: Mendeley already has BibTeX support and LaTeX created articles are indexed correctly. We’ve received your beta testing request and will let you know!
Comment by Mike Arthur — Thursday 8th May, 2008 @ 11:49 am
Please look at opportunities at KOffice integration; KOffice has got awesome pluging capabilities nowadays and a Mendeley dock-widget (that communicates over dbus?) might be a really cool thing to do
Comment by Thomas Zander — Friday 9th May, 2008 @ 8:13 am
@Mike: Actually I though about maybe a plugin for Mendeley that would use Nepomuk as a data store, thus enriching and reusing the existing information. Of course, having a DBus interface could allow to write some extractor for the Mendeley data. But then, “integration” would not be real, only faked.
Comment by Sebastian Trüg — Friday 9th May, 2008 @ 9:04 am
@Thomas: I’d be interested in that too, is KOffice 2 working cross-platform yet?
@Sebastian: Yeh, that sounds like a good idea too. Currently Mendeley is closed source but if that changes then more extensive (i.e. beyond just DBUS) will be possible. I’m hoping to release at least some sort of code under a liberal license sooner rather than later.
Comment by Mike Arthur — Friday 9th May, 2008 @ 11:39 am
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