Ontologies for Digital libraries

Abstract

The amount of information available in both printed and electronic formats has increased dramatically in recent years. This rapid growth of information in the modern world leads people and especially the organisations that deal with such information to be organized in order to facilitate access, although standard library classification schemes are used to accomplish this goal, some flaws that are inherent in natural languages, may create severe issues in the process of classification. Hence it affects the likelihood of finding a document as well as affecting the time and effort spent organising the material. Moreover, the amount of digital documents are rapidly increasing and require easy and accessible mechanized methods (Gamage and Wijewickrema, 2013). In the same way, the digital library domain as a field of study has grown quite significantly during the last two decades. Because of its interdisciplinary nature, the digital library domain involves a large number of concepts which should be captured, classified, structured and created into digital library ontologies. Therefore, ontologies have the potential to play an important role in this field, because an ontology defines a common vocabulary for researchers who need to share information in a domain. Such ontology can be used for digital library collaboration, interoperation, research, education, and modelling. However, a large number of ontologies have been developed by different groups, using different approaches, different methods and techniques, but not in the Digital Library domain, specifically using the Reference Model proposed by Delos. This study aims to harness the collective knowledge within communities in digital libraries, improving the discovery and dissemination of knowledge through ontologies. The methodological guidelines presented in this research have been created in the context of the Methontology approach, our demonstration illustrates the creation in SKOS of the Digital library reference model (DLRM) proposed by Delos. With this we can better organize, share and discover knowledge using ontologies.