Library Review

George Macgregor

2008 Library Review

doi: 10.1108/00242530810865457

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to introduce the papers in the special issue which explores some of the potential, opportunities and challenges to be found in greater library and information science alignment with semantic web developments. Design/methodology/approach – The article is a general review of the papers in the issue. Findings – For many digital libraries or cultural institutions, the semantic web offers an opportunity to better expose valuable digital resources pertaining to research, culture or history, using common standards and technologies in a collaborative and “joined up” way. The papers in this issue “paint a rainbow”, exploring the issues through elements of case studies, reviews research and conceptual expositions and viewpoints. Originality/value – The article emphasises how the practical implications of semantic web research or developments for digital libraries and repositories is important for LIS professionals.

Nicholas Joint

2008 Library Review

doi: 10.1108/00242530810865466

Purpose –To describe and evoke the potential impact of semantic web systems at the level of library practice. Design/methodology/approach – A general outline of some of the broad issues associated with the semantic web, together with a brief, simple explanation of basic semantic web procedures with some examples of specific practical outcomes of semantic web development. Findings – That the semantic web is of central relevance to contemporary LIS practitioners, whose involvement in its development is necessary in order to determine what will be the true benefits of this form of information service innovation. Research limitations/implications – Since much of the initial discussion of this topic has been developmental and futuristic, applied practitioner‐oriented research is required to ground these discussions in a firm bedrock of applications. Practical implications – semantic web technologies are of great practical relevance to areas of LIS practice such as digital repository development and open access services. Originality/value – The paper attempts to bridge the gap between the abstractions of theoretical writing in this area and the concerns of the working library professional.

Antoine Isaac; Stefan Schlobach; Henk Matthezing; Claus Zinn

2008 Library Review

doi: 10.1108/00242530810865475

Purpose – To show how semantic web techniques can help address semantic interoperability issues in the broad cultural heritage domain, allowing users an integrated and seamless access to heterogeneous collections. Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents the heterogeneity problems to be solved. It introduces semantic web techniques that can help in solving them, focusing on the representation of controlled vocabularies and their semantic alignment. It gives pointers to some previous projects and experiments that have tried to address the problems discussed. Findings – Semantic web research provides practical technical and methodological approaches to tackle the different issues. Two contributions of interest are the simple knowledge organisation system model and automatic vocabulary alignment methods and tools. These contributions were demonstrated to be usable for enabling semantic search and navigation across collections. Research limitations/implications – The research aims at designing different representation and alignment methods for solving interoperability problems in the context of controlled subject vocabularies. Given the variety and technical richness of current research in the semantic web field, it is impossible to provide an in‐depth account or an exhaustive list of references. Every aspect of the paper is, however, given one or several pointers for further reading. Originality/value – This article provides a general and practical introduction to relevant semantic web techniques. It is of specific value for the practitioners in the cultural heritage and digital library domains who are interested in applying these methods in practice.

Sini, Margherita; Lauser, Boris; Salokhe, Gauri; Keizer, Johannes; Katz, Stephen

2008 Library Review

doi: 10.1108/00242530810865745

Purpose The main objective of the AGROVOC Concept Server CS is to create a collaborative reference platform and a onestop shop for a pool of commonly used concepts related to agriculture, containing terms, definitions and relationships between terms in multiple languages derived from various sources. This paper aims to address the issues.Designmethodologyapproach The CS offers a centralised facility where the agricultural information management community can build and share agricultural knowledge in a collaborative environment.Findings The advantages of the CS are its extensibility and modularity that provide the possibility to extend the type of information that can be stored in this system based on usercommunity needs.Research limitationsimplications Further investigation still needs to be done on the modularisation of the CS i.e. the creation of separated ontologies that can still be connected, in order to have domainrelated ontologies and to allow for better performance of the CS.Practical implications The CS serves as starting point for the development of specific domain ontologies where multilinguality and the localised representation of knowledge are essential issues. Furthermore, it will offer additional services in order to expose the knowledge to be consumed by other applications.Originalityvalue The CS Workbench provides the AGROVOC partners with the possibility to directly and collaboratively edit the AGROVOC CS. It thus provides the opportunity for direct and open manytomany communication links between communities, avoiding decentralised communication between partners and duplication of effort. For the international community, it may allow users to manage, reuse or extend agriculturerelated knowledge for better interoperability and for improved services.

Philipp Mayr; Peter Mutschke; Vivien Petras

2008 Library Review

doi: 10.1108/00242530810865484

Purpose – The general science portal “vascoda” merges structured, high‐quality information collections from more than 40 providers on the basis of search engine technology (FAST) and a concept which treats semantic heterogeneity between different controlled vocabularies. First experiences with the portal show some weaknesses of this approach which come out in most metadata‐driven Digital Libraries (DLs) or subject specific portals. The purpose of the paper is to propose models to reduce the semantic complexity in heterogeneous DLs. The aim is to introduce value‐added services (treatment of term vagueness and document re‐ranking) that gain a certain quality in DLs if they are combined with heterogeneity components established in the project “Competence Center Modeling and Treatment of Semantic Heterogeneity”. Design/methodology/approach – Two methods, which are derived from scientometrics and network analysis, will be implemented with the objective to re‐rank result sets by the following structural properties: the ranking of the results by core journals (so‐called Bradfordizing) and ranking by centrality of authors in co‐authorship networks. Findings – The methods, which will be implemented, focus on the query and on the result side of a search and are designed to positively influence each other. Conceptually, they will improve the search quality and guarantee that the most relevant documents in result sets will be ranked higher. Originality/value – The central impact of the paper focuses on the integration of three structural value‐adding methods, which aim at reducing the semantic complexity represented in distributed DLs at several stages in the information retrieval process: query construction, search and ranking and re‐ranking.

A.R.D. Prasad

2008 Library Review

doi: 10.1108/00242530810865493

Purpose – The paper aims to argue that digital library retrieval should be based on semantic representations and propose a semantic infrastructure for digital libraries. Design/methodology/approach – The approach taken is formal model based on subject representation for digital libraries. Findings – Search engines and search techniques have fallen short of user expectations as they do not give context based retrieval. Deploying semantic web technologies would lead to efficient and more precise representation of digital library content and hence better retrieval. Though digital libraries often have metadata of information resources which can be accessed through OAI‐PMH, much remains to be accomplished in making digital libraries semantic web compliant. This paper presents a semantic infrastructure for digital libraries, that will go a long way in providing them and web based information services with products highly customised to users needs. Research limitations/implications – Here only a model for semantic infrastructure is proposed. This model is proposed after studying current user‐centric, top‐down models adopted in digital library service architectures. Originality/value – This paper gives a generic model for building semantic infrastructure for digital libraries. Faceted ontologies for digital libraries is just one approach. But the same may be adopted by groups working with different approaches in building ontologies to realise efficient retrieval in digital libraries.

Jürgen Krause

2008 Library Review

doi: 10.1108/00242530810865501

Purpose – To demonstrate that newer developments in the semantic web community, particularly those based on ontologies (simple knowledge organization system and others) mitigate common arguments from the digital library (DL) community against participation in the Semantic web. Design/methodology/approach – The approach is a semantic web discussion focusing on the weak structure of the Web and the lack of consideration given to the semantic content during indexing. Findings – The points criticised by the semantic web and ontology approaches are the same as those of the DL “Shell model approach” from the mid‐1990s, with emphasis on the centrality of its heterogeneity components (used, for example, in vascoda). The Shell model argument began with the “invisible web”, necessitating the restructuring of DL approaches. The conclusion is that both approaches fit well together and that the Shell model, with its semantic heterogeneity components, can be reformulated on the semantic web basis. Practical implications – A reinterpretation of the DL approaches of semantic heterogeneity and adapting to standards and tools supported by the W3C should be the best solution. It is therefore recommended that – although most of the semantic web standards are not technologically refined for commercial applications at present – all individual DL developments should be checked for their adaptability to the W3C standards of the semantic web. Originality/value – A unique conceptual analysis of the parallel developments emanating from the digital library and semantic web communities.