Semantic Web and Digital Libraries

Author(s):  
Giorgio Poletti

An analysis of the reality surrounding us clearly reveals the great amount of information, available in different forms and through different media. Volumes of information available in real time and via the Web are concepts perceived as closely related. This perception is supported by the remark that the objective of the Web was the definition and construction of a universal archive, a virtual site in which the access to documents was possible with no limits of time or space. In this digital library, documents have to be equipped with logical connections making possible for each user the definition of a reading map that expands according to the demand for knowledge gradually built up. This perspective is pointing now in the direction of the Semantic Web, a network satisfying our requests while understanding them, not by some magic telepathic communication between browser and navigator, but rather a data warehouse in which documents are matched to meta-data,1 letting specialized software to distinguish fields, importance, and correlation between documents. Semantic Web and library terms have an ever increasing close relationship, fundamental for the progress and the didactic efficiency in knowledge society.

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 9-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zahid Raza ◽  
Khalid Mahmood ◽  
Nosheen Fatima Warraich

Purpose This paper aims to describe how linked data technologies can change the digital library collections, what are the benefits of linked data applications in digital libraries and what are the challenges of digital libraries in linked data environment. Design/methodology/approach The present study is based on substantial literature review on the applications of linked data technologies in digital libraries. The search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Google Scholar were used to find the relevant literature for the study. Online databases such as Pro Quest, Science Direct, Emerald and JSTORE were also used to find the relevant literature of the study. Databases of Library Sciences Library and Information Science and Technology Abstracts and Library Information Science Abstracts were also used to find the relevant literature of the study. Library, linked data technologies, Semantic Web, digital library and digital collections were the main keywords which were used to find the relevant literature for the study. Findings The evolution of linked data technologies and Semantic Web has changed the traditional role of the libraries. Traditional libraries are converting into digital libraries and digital libraries are in a struggle to publish their resources on the Web using XML-based metadata standards. It has made capable the digital collections to be viewed by machines on the Web just like human. On the emergence of linked data applications in digital libraries, Web visibility of the libraries has been enhanced to provide the opportunities for the users to find their required quality information of libraries round-the-clock on the Web. National Library of France, National Library of Spain, Europeana, Digital Public Library of Americana, Library of Congress and The British Library have taken the initiatives to publish their resources on the Web using linked data technologies. Originality/value This study present several key issues for policy makers, software developers, decision makers and library administrators about linked data technologies and its implementations in digital libraries. The present study may play its role to facilitate the users of the Web who are enthusiastically interested to exploit the quality and authentic library resources on the Web round-the-clock. Search engines will also achieve their longstanding goal to exploit the quality resources of the libraries for their Web users to make their Web appearance more credible and trustworthy.


2010 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessio Malizia ◽  
Paolo Bottoni ◽  
S. Levialdi

The design and development of a digital library involves different stakeholders, such as: information architects, librarians, and domain experts, who need to agree on a common language to describe, discuss, and negotiate the services the library has to offer. To this end, high-level, language-neutral models have to be devised. Metamodeling techniques favor the definition of domainspecific visual languages through which stakeholders can share their views and directly manipulate representations of the domain entities. This paper describes CRADLE (Cooperative-Relational Approach to Digital Library Environments), a metamodel-based framework and visual language for the definition of notions and services related to the development of digital libraries. A collection of tools allows the automatic generation of several services, defined with the CRADLE visual language, and of the graphical user interfaces providing access to them for the final user. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated by presenting digital libraries generated with CRADLE, while the CRADLE environment has been evaluated by using the cognitive dimensions framework.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 114
Author(s):  
Mohammad Niqresh

The study aims at identifying the concept of digital library, it also tries to shed the light on the most significant intellectual issues by presenting its definition, development, functions (selection and acquisition of information resources from the web, sources indexing, communication and management of intellectual property rights, production of electronic resources and its availability, and digital resources maintaining), characteristics, and the purpose of turning into digital library, passed by the proposed stages of digital library transition, Types of Intellectual Property (Copyright, Patents, Trademarks, Commercial Secrets), it also discusses copyrights and intellectual property, the problems and challenges of digital library, and finally the future of digital library. Many researchers agree that the main objective of the digital library is to accomplish all the functions of the traditional library, but in the form of electronic digital libraries which are only an extension for jobs that are performed and the resources that are accessible in digital library. The study concluded that digital libraries emerged as an obligatory result of revolution of the third millennium which is called the communications revolution, as libraries are able to prove that they are able to stand and cope with all the modern technology, where there is no conflict between the new and modern trends in libraries issue, but it also benefits from both of them concerning their evolution instruments in service for beneficiaries in every time and place.


Author(s):  
Charles Greenidge ◽  
Hadrian Peter

Data warehouses have established themselves as necessary components of an effective Information Technology (IT) strategy for large businesses. In addition to utilizing operational databases data warehouses must also integrate increasing amounts of external data to assist in decision support. An important source of such external data is the Web. In an effort to ensure the availability and quality of Web data for the data warehouse we propose an intermediate data-staging layer called the Meta-Data Engine (M-DE). A major challenge, however, is the conversion of data originating in the Web, and brought in by robust search engines, to data in the data warehouse. The authors therefore also propose a framework, the Semantic Web Application (SEMWAP) framework, which facilitates semi-automatic matching of instance data from opaque web databases using ontology terms. Their framework combines Information Retrieval (IR), Information Extraction (IE), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and ontology techniques to produce a matching and thus provide a viable building block for Semantic Web (SW) Applications.


Author(s):  
Hadrian Peter

Data warehouses have established themselves as necessary components of an effective IT strategy for large businesses. To augment the streams of data being siphoned from transactional/operational databases warehouses must also integrate increasing amounts of external data to assist in decision support. Modern warehouses can be expected to handle up to 100 Terabytes or more of data. (Berson and Smith, 1997; Devlin, 1998; Inmon 2002; Imhoff et al, 2003; Schwartz, 2003; Day 2004; Peter and Greenidge, 2005; Winter and Burns 2006; Ladley, 2007). The arrival of newer generations of tools and database vendor support has smoothed the way for current warehouses to meet the needs of the challenging global business environment ( Kimball and Ross, 2002; Imhoff et al, 2003; Ross, 2006). We cannot ignore the role of the Internet in modern business and the impact on data warehouse strategies. The web represents the richest source of external data known to man ( Zhenyu et al, 2002; Chakrabarti, 2002; Laender et al, 2002) but we must be able to couple raw text or poorly structured data on the web with descriptions, annotations and other forms of summary meta-data (Crescenzi et al, 2001). In recent years the Semantic Web initiative has focussed on the production of “smarter data”. The basic idea is that instead of making programs with near human intelligence, we rather carefully add meta-data to existing stores so that the data becomes “marked up” with all the information necessary to allow not-sointelligent software to perform analysis with minimal human intervention. (Kalfoglou et al, 2004) The Semantic Web builds on established building block technologies such as Unicode, URIs(Uniform Resource Indicators) and XML (Extensible Markup Language) (Dumbill, 2000; Daconta et al, 2003; Decker et al, 2000). The modern data warehouse must embrace these emerging web initiatives. In this paper we propose a model which provides mechanisms for sourcing external data resources for analysts in the warehouse.


Author(s):  
B. KAMALA ◽  
J. M. NANDHINI

Ontologies have become the effective modeling for various applications and significantly in the semantic web. The difficulty of extracting information from the web, which was created mainly for visualising information, has driven the birth of the semantic web, which will contain much more resources than the web and will attach machine-readable semantic information to these resources. Ontological bootstrapping on a set of predefined sources, such as web services, must address the problem of multiple, largely unrelated concepts. The web services consist of basically two components, Web Services Description Language (WSDL) descriptors and free text descriptors. The WSDL descriptor is evaluated using two methods, namely Term Frequency/Inverse Document Frequency (TF/IDF) and web context generation. The proposed bootstrapping ontological process integrates TF/IDF and web context generation and applies validation using the free text descriptor service, so that, it offers more accurate definition of ontologies. This paper uses ranking adaption model which predicts the rank for a collection of web service documents which leads to the automatic construction, enrichment and adaptation of ontologies.


Author(s):  
Krzysztof Wecel ◽  
Pawel J. Kalczynski ◽  
Witold Abramowicz

This chapter presents how Web services architecture can be leveraged to extend an existing system to an open and flexible platform. It reviews crucial issues related to modularization, properties of the Web services, integration of heterogeneous services and incorporating new services. We describe the modeling framework used, which is the Web Service Modeling Framework (WSMF). As a case we show how the enhanced data warehouse system was remodeled in order to transform it from a closed solution to an open Web services-based system called the enhanced Knowledge Warehouse (eKW). We analyze eKW as a Web service and show how eKW conforms to the eight layers of functionality in Web services. We also speculate about the future of eKW in the semantic web and innovations it can contribute to knowledge management. In the semantic Web eDW should be used as a source of knowledge, hence the name “knowledge warehouse”.


2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 826-841 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shakeel Ahmad Khan ◽  
Rubina Bhatti

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore useful Semantic Web technologies and ontology-based applications for digital libraries. It also investigates the perceptions of university librarians and academicians in Pakistan about Semantic Web technologies and their use in digital libraries. Design/methodology/approach An exploratory research design based on Delphi research strategy was conducted to answer the research questions. Interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 50 key informants including university librarians and academicians to explore their perceptions about Semantic Web technologies and their use in digital libraries. Thematic analysis of interview data was conducted to obtain results. Findings The results of this paper showed that DuraCloud, Semantic information mashup, OntoEdit and resource description framework (RDF) are the various Semantic Web applications which are useful for digital libraries to develop semantic relationships among digital contents and increase their accessibility in the web environment. Findings revealed that Semantic Web provides precise results and meets user information needs in an effective way. Results also showed that next-generation digital libraries use context-awareness technology, intelligent agent software and detecting sensors to analyze user information needs and provide dynamic information services. This paper recommended that librarians should embrace the use of emerging web technologies in libraries and offer library services through the medium of the web. Practical implications This paper envisaged the future of digital library services and Semantic Web applications that can be used to re-structure metadata of digital library. This paper has practical implications for librarians to consider the useful applications of Semantic Web for digital library and enhance the interoperability of metadata among heterogeneous information systems. Practically, results obtained from this paper are highly useful for library schools and LIS teachers to up-date their curriculum by incorporating new contents related to web languages and Semantic Web applications for digital libraries. Originality/value This paper identifies various Semantic Web applications which are useful for developing Semantic Digital Libraries.


Author(s):  
Hanêne Ghorbel ◽  
Afef Bahri ◽  
Rafik Bouaziz

The unstructured design of Web resources favors human comprehension, but makes difficult the automatic exploitation of the contents of these resources by machines. So, the Semantic Web aims at making the cooperation between human and machine possible, by giving any information a well defined meaning. The first weavings of the Semantic Web are already prepared. Machines become able to treat and understand the data that were accustomed to only visualization, by using ontologies constitute an essential element of the Semantic Web, as they serve as a form of knowledge representation, sharing, and reuse. However, the Web content is subject to imperfection, and crisp ontologies become less suitable to represent concepts with imprecise definitions. To overcome this problem, fuzzy ontologies constitute a promising research orientation. Indeed, the definition of fuzzy ontologies components constitutes an issue that needs to be well treated. It is necessary to have an appropriate methodology of building an operationalization of fuzzy ontological models. This chapter defines a fuzzy ontological model based on fuzzy description logic. This model uses a new approach for the formal description of fuzzy ontologies. This new methodology shows how all the basic components defined for fuzzy ontologies can be constructed.


Author(s):  
Leonardo Candela ◽  
Donatella Castelli ◽  
Pasquale Pagano

Digital Libraries have achieved a fundamental role in our knowledge society. By making the wealth of material contained in libraries, museum, archives and any knowledge repository worldwide available they are giving citizens in every place of the world the opportunity to appreciate their global cultural heritage and use it for study, work or leisure. They are revolutionising the whole knowledge management lifecycle. In this chapter, the history characterizing these “knowledge enabling technologies” is described. The history starts from the early attempts toward systems supporting knowledge discovery and reaches the current age in which a plethora of different realizations of digital library systems coexist. The evolutionary process conducting to the current, multi-instanced and still evolving status of affairs as well as the motivations governing it are identified and presented. The main initiatives and milestones producing the nowadays instances of these knowledge enabling systems are mentioned. Finally, the impact these systems had and are having on various aspects of our society is discussed.


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