A water conservation digital library using ontologies

Abstract

PurposeThe paper's aims is to present research that evaluates a technology that assists in organizing and retrieving knowledge stored in a variety of forms (books, papers, models, decision support systems, databases) through a real world application.Design/methodology/approachOntology has been used to manage the Water Conservation Digital Library in Florida, USA, which holds a dynamic collection of various types of digital resources in the domain of urban water conservation. The ontology based back‐end powers a fully operational web interface, available at: http://library.conservefloridawater.org Findings – The system has demonstrated numerous benefits of the ontology application, including easier and more precise finding of resources, information sharing and reuse, and has proved to effectively facilitate information management.Research limitations/implicationsA large and dynamic number of concepts makes it difficult to keep the ontology consistent and to accurately manually catalog resources. To address these issues, ongoing research focuses on the area of information extraction with the aid of natural language processing techniques.Originality/valueThe paper presents a real‐world‐verified application of ontology to a digital library. It may be of potential interest for anyone who needs to effectively manage a collection of digital resources.