“The aim of this tutorial is to educate attendees on the applications of Semantic Web and Social Networking (Web 2.0) technologies in digital library systems. These technologies include metadata management, semantic search and browsing, personalized and community-aware services, and semantically empowered federations of digital libraries. The semantic digital libraries can be used in enterprise scale systems such as knowledge management systems, medical records systems, legal research systems and others will be discussed at some depth. These applications can benefit in manners which directly impact the ROI for the effort of including semantic encoding and metadata into an enterprises digital library based systems and services. After this tutorial, the audience will be able to start using existing semantic digital libraries or apply Semantic Web technologies to digital library systems.” [session abstract]

Slides etc here.

Following some introduction to this 3.5 hour marathon, Stefan Decker provided a brief overview of the Semantic Web in the digital library space. He quotes the early Semantic Web definition, seeing it as;

“an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.”

But asks, “Wasn’t the web meant to be more” [than just a set of links]?

Following some more background on the Semantic Web and its component technologies, we got down to the meat of looking at the four big semantic digital library initiatives; JeromeDL, BRICKS, FEDORA, and SIMILE.

First up, JeromeDL.

“JeromeDL is a Social Semantic Digital Library. As a digital library, it allows institutions to easily publish documents on the Web. It supports a variety of document formats and allows to store and query a rich bibliographic description of each document.

To find relevant documents in JeromeDL users can use searching and browsing features. Whole documents content can be searched through, as well as single fields of the documents description, like author or publish year. Users can also find documents by browsing content of subject categories and keywords

With JeromeDL’s social and semantic services every library user can bookmark interesting books, articles or other materials in semantically annotated directories. Users can allow others to see their bookmarks and annotations and share their knowledge within a social network. JeromeDL can also treat a single library resource as a blog post. Users can comment the content of the resource and reply to others’ comments and this way create new knowledge.”

Stefan points to the different motivational use cases for various users of a [digital] library; librarians with their need for rich structure, etc. He suggests that DC works for meeting the needs of general users, BibTeX for researchers, and MARC21 for the librarians themselves, and that a single system therefore needs to support all three simultaneously, using RDF to store (and represent) each from a common pool.

Some of the ideas around Social Semantic Collaborative Filtering are interesting, linking the lifestream of staff, students and others in order to realise the value of aggregating all of the points at which they touch the network. It would be good to see more on this, although some of the explanation seemed overly involved…

Coffee break…

Technorati Tags: Semantic Web, Talis, WWW2007

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