Digital Repositories and the Semantic Web: Semantic Search and Navigation for DSpace

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : DSpace User Group PresentationsDate: 2009-05-21 08:30 AM – 10:00 AMIn many digital repository implementations, resources are often described against some flavor of metadata schema, popularly the Dublin Core Element Set (DCMES), as is the case with the DSpace system. However, such an approach cannot capture richer semantic relations that exist or may be implied, in the sense of a Semantic Web ontology. Therefore we first suggest a method in order to semantically intensify the underlying data model and develop an automatic translation of the flatly organized metadata information to this new ontology. Then we propose an implementation that provides for inference-based knowledge discovery, retrieval and navigation on top of digital repositories, based on this ontology. We apply this technique to real information stored in the University of Patras Institutional Repository that is based on DSpace, and confirm that more powerful, inference-based queries can indeed be performed

Metadata and Semantics in Digital Object Collections: A Case-Study on CIDOC-CRM and Dublin Core and a Prototype Implementation

Digital collections often foster a large number of digital resources that need to be efficiently managed, described and disseminated. Metadata play a key role in these tasks as they offer the basis upon which more advanced services can be built. However, it is not always the case that such collections' metadata expose explicit or even well-structured semantics. Ways to bridge this "semantic gap" are increasingly being sought, as our review of the current state-of-the-art reveals. Most importantly though, in this paper we comment on two well-known metadata standards, popular in cultural heritage applications, namely CIDOC-CRM and Dublin Core; as diverse their scope may be, we nevertheless show how applications can benefit from a transition to explicit semantic structures in these domains, in a way as painless as possible and conformant to Semantic Web standards. We conclude by presenting a concrete, prototype implementation that serves as a proof-of-concept about the ideas argued for