Evaluation of Semantic and Social Technologies for Digital Libraries

Abstract

Libraries are the tools we use to learn and to answer our questions. The quality of our work depends, among others, on the quality of the tools we use. Recent research in digital libraries is focused, on one hand on improving the infrastructure of the digital library management systems (DLMS), and on the other on improving the metadata models used to annotate collections of objects maintained by DLMS. The latter includes, among others, the semantic web and social networking technologies. Recently, the semantic web and social networking technologies are being introduced to the digital libraries domain. The expected outcome is that the overall quality of information discovery in digital libraries can be improved by employing social and semantic technologies. In this chapter we present the results of an evaluation of social and semantic end-user information discovery services for the digital libraries.