Digital collections of academic libraries and semantic support

Examples, potentials and challenges

Judith Gulpers

Overview

• What’s the problem?

• Possible solutions in the literature

• About the literature

You can’t read at them all!

What’s the problem?

3. Where do you search?

4. Human information processing capacity is limited

5. Computers don’t speak ‘human’.

What’s the problem?

• High recall and high precision are needed: finding the relevant articles with not much irrelevant articles.

• For a scholar relevancy depends on his needs, interests, and context of the search.

• In databases: Articles are ranked on relevancy, but that relevancy is calculated.

• Because: the computer doesn’t understand the query.

An example

‘Mouse’

For a biologist: Mus musculus

For a computer scientist: a computer device

For a psychologist: test animal

For a doctor: cause of RSI

The solution?

Semantic support– gives meaning to information so that humans and

computers can work together

– metadata (data about data) is added and shared between multiple applications

– computers can read this metadata, because it is put in an ontology

– ontology: “formally describes concepts and relationships which can exist between them in some community”

Semantics between digital libraries

• Digital libraries already have a lot of semantic support: search by author, title words, keywords from a thesaurus, etc.

• The problem: communication between the DLs

• An example: Vascode portal

• Creating cross-cordanance between different vocabularies

• Human work!

• Does it work?! Not visible in www.vascoda.de/

Semantics for research data

• UK project ‘policy grid’: concentrates on research data (questionnaires and interviews) collected for evidence-based policy research

• Ontologies were made for the context of the data: who collected the data, how, when and where

• But what about the content of the data? • Researchers: don’t even try!• Their solution: let researchers add their own

tags

Searching ín articles

• Automatic indexing of documents

• Software creates a fingerprint of the document: representation of the characteristic concepts in a piece of source text

• Thesauri are used to know what are characteristic concepts within a certain domain

About the literature

• Our startingpoint:What role can social scientists play in enhancing the

digital libraries?

• The literature is mostly written by computer scientists and véry technical

• Are the computer scientists even telling the scholars what they are doing??

• Libraries can play a role in this, as intermediate!