Semantic Digital Libraries Bringing Libraries to Web 3.0

Libraries were always the prime source of information for both students and scholars. Recently this information has been published online with digital library systems. Current digital libraries have to provide efficient information discovery solutions to adapt to the fast development of new technologies; they also have to cater the current generations of students. The research on the Semantic Web and the online social networks contributes to the digital libraries domain by supporting interoperability with formal semantics, improving interlinking of information and encouraging users to contribute and share knowledge.

Semantic technologies support more flexible information management than that offered by the classic digital libraries. Information about library resources can be composed from heterogeneous sources, including contributions from the communities of library users. These annotations, combined with legacy data, build foundations for more efficient information discovery in digital libraries.

This book reviews architectures, abstract models, metadata standards and various technologies for building digital library management systems. We derive requirements for advanced digital libraries and propose an architecture model and a set of ontologies for semantic digital libraries. Finally, we present information discovery services using the semantic and social technologies, and the prototype implementation of a semantic digital library that answers these aforementioned requirements.

Our hypothesis is that the semantic and social technologies applied a digital library management system delivers more efficient information discovery solutions, while the library users become more satisfied and can remember more information from what they have learned when using the library. We present two information discovery services that use the semantic and social technologies; we also show a prototype of a semantic digital library. We support our hypothesis by discussing results of initial evaluations of both services and a comprehensive evaluation of the semantic digital library prototype.