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Abstract
Purpose - To describe a browsing and searching personalization system for digital libraries based on the use of ontologies for describing the relationships between all the elements which take part in a digital library scenario of use.
Design/methodology/approach - Identification of all the desired functionalities and requirements that are necessary to fully integrate the use of a digital library in an e-learning environment, and the basic elements that are used to build the ontology that describes such scenario.
Findings - The elements that determine the functionalities of the desired personalization system: first, the user's profile, including navigational history and user preferences; and second, the information collected from the navigational behavior of the digital library users.
Research limitations/implications - The ontology is not complete. In fact, the ontology in itself will evolve with the new apparition of desired functionalities and requirements of the personalization system.
Practical implications - Such a personalization system will be very helpful to the users of a digital library to improve their experience of use.
Originality/value - The use of ontologies promotes the integration of new services into existing ones, and the interoperability with other systems through the appropriate semantic web services. New system functionalities and requirements can be added by including the appropriate description into the ontology framework that defines the digital library scenario of use.
Keywords Digital libraries, Information searches, Personal needs, Customization, Distance learning
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Distance education is becoming one of the most attractive methods for incorporating all kinds of people into higher and university degree education levels, moving towards a "blended" technology approach deploying multiple technologies. The introduction of new technologies of information and communications with the intensive use of e-learning environments, as a virtual campus, for example, allows students to break through the barriers of space and time, and to design their own lifelong curricula, adapting it to their particular necessities and preferences, according to their possibilities as students, changing the usual way of both teaching and learning (Jonassen et al., 1995), setting up the foundations of e-learning environments (Rosenberg, 2001).
1 The students of an e-learning environment have access to a predetermined repository of learning resources, which are part of the learning process designed by the team of instructional designers...