Home | Resource Description, Discovery 
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FUTURE AGENDA

The Semantic Web is a vision described in a Scientific American magazine cover story in May 2001. According to Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), ‘The Semantic Web is a web of data, in some ways like a global database. This builds on the idea that ‘a goal of the WWW is that it should be useful not only for human-human communication, but also that machines would be able to participate and help’. But the Semantic Web has a long way to go before this dream is realized. It will be built in parts, by people with varied interests. The real power of the Semantic Web will be realised when people create many programs that collect Web content from diverse sources, process the information and exchange the results with other programs.

In its envisaged next step, the Semantic Web will break out of the virtual realm and extend into the physical world. The vision of the Web-enabled microwave oven consulting the frozen-food manufacturer's Web site for the best cooking instructions can be extended to the services provided by public libraries, archives and museums. The virtual picture frame might for example, consult the local museum or art gallery for an ideal picture to display and the local virtual public library for an ideal e-book biography to download to accompany it, in response to a simple voice request. In this environment, the imagination of public library people should be encouraged to run wild!

Important concepts, technologies, protocols and standards for developing the Semantic Web
are already in place or well on the way, including XML, RDF and unique identification.

Ontologies. An ontology may be described as a formal description of objects and their inter-relationships. In the context of the Semantic Web, the aim is to enable machines to speak to machines with limited or no human intervention. (See Ontoweb and Wonderweb.) There are progressively more semantically rich approaches to modelling ontologies, including:

• Term list– undefined relationships

• Classification scheme

• Thesauri – inheritance and association relations

• Topic maps – a new ISO standard for a system describing knowledge structures and associating them with information resources. They should provide powerful ways of navigating large and interconnected corpora. Instead of replicating the features of a book-index the topic map generalises them extending them in many directions at once.

• Ontology language – DAML+Oil – description logic relationships

Ontologies are of growing importance in knowledge management systems and in the development of the Semantic Web and have applications in knowledge management systems such as e.g. in e-commerce for the description of products and services or the description and organisation of digitised museum collections.

Digital signatures, public key infrastructure for the conduct of secure electronic transactions and the establishment of trust are also seen as key element in the Semantic Web. (See personalisation).

Web services are a relatively new concept, expected to evolve rapidly over the next few years. They could be the first major practical manifestation of Semantic Web-based thinking. Detailed definitions vary, but web services will enable the building of software applications without having to know who the user is, where they are, or anything else about them. (See Diffuse). In the next few years web services may be developed which can be understood and used automatically by the computing devices of users and of public libraries. External Application Services Providers (ASPs) may also provide such services. Web services are based on open, Internet standards.

The ‘stack’ of core standards and protocols for web services is being developed and is expected to be finalised during 2002. They include (in addition to XML):

• Web Services Description Language (WSDL) which enables a common description of Web Services

• Universal Description, Discovery & Integration (UDDI) registries which expose information about a business or other entity and its technical interfaces

• Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) which enables structured message exchange between computer programmes.

The concept of web services is currently being developed under the banner of e-commerce. However, there do appear to be potential applications for public sector service providers. For example, search interfaces could be accessed or provided as web services by public libraries or by Application Service Providers on their behalf. The overwhelming need to develop plug-in modes of technology transfer from industry to local cultural heritage institutions is a key element for the future.

The future will see the fruits of innumerable developments in the field of information retrieval, which will make the present systems seem primitive. Sophisticated personalised robotic agents will continuously search an Internet which has been specially designed to be easy for them to search by means of metadata, controlled vocabulary and unique identifiers. They will retrieve precisely what their users want, because they know their searching habits, and they will do this while they are otherwise occupied. They will retrieve no redundant information and miss nothing relevant no matter where it may be.

LINKS
International
IFLA standard on bibliographical description of items
http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/pubs/isbd_m0602.pdf

Denmark
BibHit
A catalogue of Internet resources indexed by using metadata. This is a collaborative project involving three public libraries - Hobro Public Library, the Main Public Library of Aarhus and Silkeborg Public Library and one research library - the Library of the Aarhus School of Business.
http://www.bibhit.dk/info/english.htm

Finland
Link Library
A directory of Internet resources selected and described by librarians as a co-operative effort. It contains over 6000 links, organised by the Finnish version of Dewey (ykl) and is published in two languages: Finnish and Swedish. Also includes a metasearch facility which searches library catalogues simultaneously with link library.
http://www.kirjastot.fi/linkkikirjasto/selaus.asp?kieli=suomi&hid=&languageid=

Germany
National cataloguing and indexing scheme
German public libraries have adopted this scheme for resource description: it has 25 categories. Many use centrally produced data, increasingly delivered online by the National library or the biggest library supplier, EKZ of Reutlingen.
http://www.ekz-bibliotheksservice.de/ekz/home.nsf/pages/startseite

Netherlands
OCLC PICA
Parallel searching of the Netherlands Central Catalogue and catalogues of different libraries at the same time.
http://oclcpica.org/?id=2&ln=uk

UK
Co-East, a co-operative of a number of public library authorities in the east of England http://www.co-east.net/

Leeds Museums, a website offering a virtual tour of the city's museums.
http://www.leedslearning.net/makingconnections/library/flashcheck.asp?platform=win

Glasgow digital library project
http://gdl.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/

Libraries Access Sunderland scHeme
http://www.lash.sunderland.ac.uk/

seamlessUK – a distributed community information system
http://www.seamless-uk.info/

USA
Solinet
A membership network of libraries working in to improve access to information, and to enable members to effectively address the region's needs for education, economic development, and improved quality of life.
http://www.solinet.net/index.cfm

Home | Resource Description, Discovery 
and Retrieval (Summary)
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