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Information organization futures
Edited by Bradford Eden
Introduction
Nowadays, libraries across the world employ online public access catalog (OPAC) systems in order to facilitate quick access to their content ([7] Leeves et al. , 1994). Such content refers to a registry of information entities considered as library material such as books, computer files, magazines, etc. Many times, information entities within a library are well described in various ways through the employment of semantic-enabled technologies such as thesauri, controlled vocabularies, etc.
As far as information retrieval is concerned, however, most of the times OPACs do not take advantage of the expressiveness of information deriving from such technologies and remain antiquated browsing interfaces relying on static structures with crude search tools useful only for locating specified materials ([1] Bennett, 2006). Thus, the graphical user interface (GUI) seems to prevent users from exploiting the functionality deriving from the employment of such technologies.
The proposed paper aims at providing a robust, user-friendly and at the same time efficient navigation procedure in an online library catalog that is based on semantic information. Instead of relying on a static, predefined hierarchical navigation structure, which forces users to follow certain paths, the proposed navigation procedure relies on a dynamic, interactive graph-based structure. Such a structure may be encoded in a variety of semantic-aware technologies implementing subject-based classification ([4] Garshol, 2004) such as thesauri, taxonomies, ontologies, etc. The ultimate goal of the navigation procedure is to guide users in locating useful information as accurately and efficiently as possible.
The origin of semantics
Semantics have been in the neighborhood for quite some time now, long before the emergence of library-related tools such as thesauri or ontologies. The knowledge management (KM) community has produced considerable work aiming at instructing machines on how to comprehend the semantics of information that they possess, in order to develop software capable of managing knowledge instead of plain information.
Despite the initial promising results, however, things did not evolve the way most members of the KM community anticipated. Mapping human behavior and wisdom proved to be particularly complex and subjective among KM researchers. Consequently, mostly monolithic systems and theories have been developed, all featuring certain advantages but also drawbacks when compared against each other. The point is that the absence...