﻿Data Processing

If you want to give something back there is an important thing you can do (besides donating, spreading the word, etc.) and that is: sharing your data. One of the reasons we develop Docear is that we want to know how mind maps are created and what kind of information they contain. We want to know this in order to improve Docear and other applications. For instance, we believe that data from mind maps could be used to enhance document classification or social tag recommender systems (read our publications for more details). And to do this we need mind maps - your mind maps. We are aware that mind maps may contain very sensitive and private information and therefore it's entirely up to you if you share your data or not.

On the very first start of Docear, you will see a dialog asking you about which data you want to share. In the following, we would like to explain what happens with your data if you activate the options. But first: whichever functions you activate, we will never give your personal information such as your name and email to third parties! And most importantly: We are bound to the very strict Germany data privacy law. That means, among others, that you may request us at any time to tell you which information about you is stored on our server and you have the right to request the complete deletion of all your data.


Online Backup

If you activate this function, all your mind maps are stored on our server each time you save a mind map in Docear (of course, the original file remains on your computer). If you are not online at the time of saving, a copy is created and uploaded to our server the next time you are online. Your backups can be accessed through our web interface and you can not only access the latest version of your mind map but also all other revisions. That means, if you realize you did a mistake or you deleted a mind map by mistake, you can restore your mind map easily. In future we plan to backup your reference data and PDFs as well, but for now only mind maps are stored on our server. If you use our backup feature, we will do some basic statistical analysis on your data. That means we will analyse how many users have how many mind maps (min, max, avg), how large mind maps are (file size), how often they are edited, etc. But we will not look into you mind maps.


Research

If this function is activated, your mind maps will be transferred to our server (similar to the backup function) and we will do more sophisticated analyses with them. For instance, we will analyse the language of your mind map, how many nodes they contain, how often your create and edit nodes, how many words a node contain, how many hyperlinks etc. It might also be that we have a look at your mind map if it stands out the average mind map. Results will be published as research papers but only aggregated data which means nobody will be able to track back any information to you. Also, we will not publish your mind maps and of course we will never ever use  information contained in the mind maps for ourselves  (.i.e. if you manage ideas for new patents in your mind maps, we won't say 'hey, great idea, let's file a patent'). It might also be that we let partners such as SciPlore, Mr. Dlib or FreePlane do research on your data but they have the same obligations to respect your private information as we have.


Usage Mining

If you activate this function, we monitor how you use Docear. This includes which function you use, how often you start Docear, with how many mind maps you work at the same time, and how long you work on your data. We use this data to improve Docear and find out how researchers utilize mind mapping functions to manage their literature. Again, results will be published in research papers but only summarized results that won't allow anybody to track back any private information to you.


Utilize data / Information retrieval

If you activate this function, we will analyse your usage behavior, mind maps, PDFs, and reference data with the goal of enhancing external applications such as academic search engines and search query recommender systems. This works as follows: For instance, if you reference Paper A in your mind map, we will analyse which terms occur around the node which references Paper A. We then use the terms to index Paper A. Let's assume the referencing node contains the term 'academic search engine optimization'. In this case we would store the information that Paper A is relevant for the term 'academic search engine optimization'. We might use this information for our own academic search engine or give it to other search engines. This means, if a user of those search engines searches for 'academic search engine optimization' the search engine might show Paper A as a result. Similarly, if a mind map contains two nodes, one with the term 'recommender system', another one with the term 'user model', we analyse the nodes and store the information that the terms 'recommender system' and 'user model' are related. If a user searches for 'recommender system' we might recommend to him to search for 'user model' too. In addition, we might analyse your reference data (BibTeX file) and PDFs to fetch bibliographic and citation data from them. This data might be used to fill databases of academic search engines.

What does all this mean? It means, if you activate this function, we certainly will not publish e.g. entire mind maps but it might happen that parts of them are published (e.g. terms contained in them). Of course, we try to protect your privacy and remove phone numbers and email addresses that might occur in a mind map. Nevertheless, there is a chance that some information is published you don't feel comfortable with. Therefore, we would highly appreciate if you activate this function but if you are working on top-secret research or manage highly private information, it might be better to let this function deactivated.


Recommendations

If you activate this function, we will show you recommendations for academic papers, conferences etc. that might be of interest to you. As a consequence we will do research on your files and usage data (see above for details) and process/analyse your mind maps to build user models, generate recommendations, and improve the recommender algorithm. It basically means that you also agree to "Usage Mining" and "Research" (the options above).


Some more information

Some more (technical) information. If you are a registered user and provided your log-in data in Docear, all collected information will be assigned to your user account. If you are not a registered user and activate any of the above functions, we will create an account automatically for you and all information are assigned to this account. If you initially have an automatically created account, and then register a standard account, we will carry over your old data to your newly registered account.

If you don't want any data of yours to be analyzed just deactivate all the functions

Questions? Please contact us!