Semantic Digital Libraries

Semantic Digital Libraries

Libraries have always been an inspiration for the standards and technologies developed by semantic web activities. However, except for the Dublin Core specification, semantic web and social networking technologies have not been widely adopted and further developed by major digital library initiatives and projects. Yet semantic technologies offer a new level of flexibility, interoperability, and relationships for digital repositories. Kruk and McDaniel present semantic web-related aspects of current digital library activities, and introduce their functionality; they show examples ranging from general architectural descriptions to detailed usages of specific ontologies, and thus stimulate the awareness of researchers, engineers, and potential users of those technologies. Their presentation is completed by chapters on existing prototype systems such as JeromeDL, BRICKS, and Greenstone, as well as a look into the possible future of semantic digital libraries. This book is aimed at researchers and graduate students in areas like digital libraries, the semantic web, social networks, and information retrieval. This audience will benefit from detailed descriptions of both today’s possibilities and also the shortcomings of applying semantic web technologies to large digital repositories of often unstructured data.

Digital Libraries and the Semantic Web

E-Librarian Service

This book introduces a new approach to designing E-Librarian Services. With the help of this system, users will be able to retrieve multimedia resources from digital libraries more efficiently than they would by browsing through an index or by using a simple keyword search. E-Librarian Services combine recent advances in multimedia information retrieval with aspects of human-machine interfaces, such as the ability to ask questions in natural language; they simulate a human librarian by finding and delivering the most relevant documents that offer users potential answers to their queries. The premise is that more pertinent results can be retrieved if the search engine understands the meaning of the query; the returned results are therefore logical consequences of an inference rather than of keyword matches. Moreover, E-Librarian Services always provide users with a solution, even in situations where they are unable to offer a comprehensive answer.