Content and knowledge management in a digital library and museum

Abstract

This article discusses the design of a digital library that addresses both content and knowledge management. The design of the digital library features two major distinctions: (1) the system incorporates a two-tier repository system to facilitate content management, and (2) the system incorporates an object-oriented model to facilitate the management of temporal information and exploits information extraction and deductive inference to derive implied knowledge based on the content of the digital library. The two-tier repository system relieves the system manager from manually maintaining the hyperlinks among the Web pages, when the digital library content is updated. The task of maintaining hyperlinks among Web pages can become cumbersome to the system manager if there are a large number of Web pages and hyperlinks. With respect to knowledge management, this design aims at facilitating temporal information management and deriving implied relations among the objects in the digital library. The motivation behind developing these knowledge processing utilities is to create a system that complements the capabilities of human beings. Deriving a comprehensive list of implied relations is an exhausting task if the digital library contains a great amount of information and the number of implied relations is great. With such knowledge-processing utilities, specialists are released from performing tedious work and can, therefore, spend more time with more productive philosophical activities to derive advanced knowledge. Applying knowledge management utilities effectively can extend the applications of digital libraries to new dimensions.