KMi Seminars
Open Source Digital Library Software: Building bridges not islands using Greenstone
This event took place on Wednesday 30 May 2007 at 11:30

 
Dr David Bainbridge University of Waikato, New Zealand

A prominent digital library researcher recently likened the development of open source digital library software as "more like stepping on the toes of others rather than standing on the shoulders of giants". The remark (said more out of exasperation than anything else) refers to the trend in digital library software development of building standalone systems, of development teams preferring to "roll their own" software solution rather than tap in to other open source DL projects. This is an issue we have been addressing in the Greenstone digital library project over the last few years. Drawing upon protocols such as SRW and OAI, document and metadata standards such as MOD and METS, and other web-based technologies, in this talk I will illustrate various ways Greenstone can be used to build those bridges rather than remain an island.

 
KMi Seminars Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...


Semantic Web and Knowledge Services
"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation" (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...

Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.