Semantically Enhancing Collections of Library and Non-Library Content

Abstract

Many digital libraries have not made the transition to semantic digital libraries, and often with good reason. Librarians and information technologists may not yet grasp the value of semantic mappings of bibliographic metadata, they may not have the resources to make the transition and, even if they do, semantic web tools and standards have varied in terms of maturity and performance. Selecting appropriate or reasonable classes and properties from ontologies, linking and augmenting bibliographic metadata as it is mapped to triples, data fusion and re-use, and considerations about what it means to represent this data as a graph, are all challenges librarians and information technologists face as they transition their various collections to the semantic web. This paper presents some lessons we have learned building small, focused semantic digital library collections that combine bibliographic and non-bibliographic data, based on specific topics. The tools map and augment the metadata to produce a collection of triples. We have also developed some prototype tools atop these collections which allow users to explore the content in ways that were either not possible or not easy to do with other library systems.