Digital Libraries of the Future

Use of Semantic Web and Social Bookmarking to

support E-learning in Digital Libraries

Sebastian Ryszard Kruk

Digital Enterprise Research Institute
National University of Ireland, Galway

sebastian.kruk@deri.org
http://corrib.deri.ie/
 Copyright 2006 Digital Enterprise Research www.deri.ie
Institute. All rights reserved.
Presentation outline

• Motivation
• Short Introduction to Semantic Web 2.0
• Building Social Semantic Digital Library
– Semantic Digital Libraries
– Towards Online Communities for Digital Libraries
• JeromeDL and other Corrib components
• JeromeDL in Action
• e-Learning 2.0
• Conclusions

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Motivations

• John teaches biology, over the Internet, using digital

libraries and modern technologies (wikis, blogs)

• How to deliver the material just-in-time?

• How to pre-asses students?
• How to automate most of the process?

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Web 1.0 e-Learning

Creation

Consumption

4
Web 2.0 e-Learning

Creation

Communities

Consumption

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Semantic Web e-Learning

Creation

Semantic sources

Consumption

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Semantic Web 2.0 e-Learning

Semantic sources
Creation

Contribution

Communities

Consumption

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The Semantic Web – A Brief Introduction

• Current Web vs. Semantic Web?

– An extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined
meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. [Tim
Berners-Lee]
– Current Web was designed for humans, and there is little information usable for
machines
• Was the Web meant to be more?
– Objects with well defined attributes as opposed to untyped hyperlinks between
Internet resources
– A network of relationships amongst named objects, yielding unified information
management tasks
• What do you mean by “Semantic”?
– the semantics of something is the meaning of something
– Semantic Web is able to describe things in a way that computers can understand
The Semantic Web – A Brief Introduction

Where are we in the

You
“Semantic Web Are
layer cake”? Here!
The Semantic Web – A Brief Introduction

The challenge for the Semantic Web

– The Semantic Web can’t work all by itself
– For example, it is not very likely that you will be able to sell your
car just by putting your RDF file on the Web
– Need society-scale applications: Semantic Web agents and/or
services, consumers and processors for semantic data, more
advanced collaborative applications
The Semantic Web – What is RDF ?

Describing things on the Semantic Web

– RDF (Resource Description Framework)
• a data format for describing information and resources,
• the fundamental data model for the Semantic Web
– Using RDF, we can describe relationships between things like:
• A is a part of B or
• Y is a member of Z
• and their properties (size, weight, age, price…) in a machine-understandable
format where each thing has a
– RDF graph-based model delivers straightforward machine processing
– Putting information into RDF files makes it possible for “scutters” or RDF
crawlers to search, discover, pick up, collect, analyse and
process information from the Web
The Semantic Web – What is RDF ?

A simple RDF example

– Statement:
“Stefan Decker is the creator of the resource (web page)
http://www.stefandecker.org”
– Structure:
Resource (subject) http://www.stefandecker.org
Property(predicate) http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/creator
Value (object) “Stefan Decker”
– Directed graph:

dc:creator Stefan Decker

http://www.stefandecker.org
The Semantic Web – How RDF can help us?

How RDF can help us?

• identify objects
• establish relationships
• express a new relationship
just add a new RDF statement
• integrate information from different sources
 copy all the RDF data together
• RDF allows many points of view
The Semantic Web – Ontologies and Schemata

• What is an Ontology?
„An ontology is a specification of a conceptualization.“
Tom Gruber, 1993

• Ontologies are social contracts

– Agreed, explicit semantics
– Understandable to outsiders
– (Often) derived in a community process
• Ontology markup and representation languages:
– RDF and RDF Schema
– OWL
– Other: DAML+OIL, EER, UML, Topic Maps, MOF, XML
Schemas
The Semantic Web – RDF Schema

• Defines small vocabulary for RDF:

– Class, subClassOf, type
– Property, subPropertyOf
– domain, range
• Vocabulary can be used to define other vocabularies for
your application domain
Person
subClassOf subClassOf

domain range
Student hasSuperVisor Researcher

type type
Frank hasSuperVisor Jeen
The Semantic Web – Applications

• Semantic Web cannot be and is not only a set of

recommendations
• Semantic Web is becoming reality by applications that
support it and are based on it
• Enabling technologies:
– RDF Storages: Sesame, Jena, YARS
– Reasoners: KAON, Racer
– Editors: Protege, SWOOP, MarcOnt Portal
• End-User applications:
– Semantic wikis: Makna, SemperWiki
– Semantic blogs
– Semantic digital libraries
What is a Semantic Digital Library?

Semantic digital libraries

– integrate information based on different metadata, e.g.:
resources, user profiles, bookmarks, taxonomies
– provide interoperability with other systems (not only digital
libraries) on either metadata or communication level or both
– delivering more robust, user friendly and adaptable search and
browsing interfaces empowered by semantics
How are Semantic Digital Libraries different?

Semantic digital libraries extend digital libraries by

– describing and exposing its resources in a machine
‘understandable’ way
– resources can be
• contents, digital artefacts
• organization of objects (e.g. collections)
• users, user communities
• controlled vocabularies, thesauri,
taxonomies
– expose the semantics of their metadata
in terms of an ontology
• defined using a formal language
– deliver mediation services for communication
with other systems
Semantic Web Technologies for Digital Libraries?

Metadata is the key concept

• the Web does not have metadata
– the idea of a Semantic Web is nice but difficult to implement
• many digital libraries do have metadata in place
• we simply must make them available in a machine
understandable format
• the Semantic Web provides the format: RDF
Semantic Web Technologies for Digital Libraries?

Knowledge in bibliographic records

• Digital Libraries already have controlled vocabularies,
taxonomies or even ontologies in place
• the challenge is to model this knowledge in a machine
understandable way
• the Semantic Web provides ontology languages:
– RDF Schema
– OWL
– SKOS
Benefits of Semantic Digital Libraries

Problems of today’s libraries

• rapidly growing islands of highly organized information
– How to find things in a growing information space?
• is it enough to have a full-text index (à la Google)?
• typical “end-users” versus “expert users”

• converging digital library systems

– e.g. uniform access to Europe’s digital libraries and cultural
heritage
Benefits of Semantic Digital Libraries

The two main benefits of Semantic Digital Libraries

• new search paradigms for the information space
– Ontology-based search / facet search
– Community-enabled browsing
• providing interoperability on the data level
– integrating metadata from various heterogeneous sources
– Interconnecting different digital library systems
 Searching the Sample Bibliographic Record

Classification Paintings • Full-text search

– “Paintings” AND “Van Gogh” AND
Object/Work type paintings “flowers” no result

Title Irises
• Semantic query
– if the knowledge that “irises” are
Creation- Vincent van Gogh; painter: “flowers” is modeled in an ontology
Creator/Role Gogh, Vincent van (Dutch (e.g. subclass-hierarchy)
painter, 1853-1890) – we can query for all “Paintings” by “Van
Gogh” with subject “flowers”
and retrieve also the picture with
subject “irises”
Creation-Date 1889, earliest: 1889, latest:
1889

Subject-Matter irises, nature, soil, etc.

Current Location- J. Paul Getty Museum

Repository Name

Copyright 2000 The J. Paul Getty Trust & College Art Association, Inc.
Semantic Digital Libraries and Existing DL Systems

• how to handle the legacy (meta-)data problem

• lifting existing (meta-)data to a semantic level
– simple solutions like MARC21 DublinCore
– complex ontologies like MarcOnt Ontology for capturing
concepts from different standards
• legacy libraries expose their metadata via well
established protocols - the metadata can be imported
into semantic DLs
• semantic DLs can play a role of integration champions in
the information retrieval process in heterogeneous
networks: OAI-PMH, Z39.50, Dienst
Application Areas for Semantic Web Technologies

• Thesauri & Controlled Vocabularies

– qualified DublinCore
– DMoz, DDC-based taxonomies
– SKOS, WordNet and other thesauri
• Schema Mappings / Crosswalks
– MarcOnt Ontology – aims to cover concepts from MARC21, BibTeX and
DublinCore
– MarcOnt Mediation Services – an open mediation framework between common
legacy metadata standards
• Metadata Integration
– RDF as a common data model for integrating metadata from various autonomous
and heterogeneous data sources
– OWL for modeling the data source’s semantics
– SPARQL as a common query language
Semantic DL as Evolving Knowledge Space

• In state-of-the-art digital libraries users are consumers

– Retrieve contents based on available bibliographic records
• Recent trends: user communities
– Connetea
– Flickr
• In Semantic digital libraries users are contributers as well
– Tagging (Web 2.0)
– Social Semantic Collaborative Filtering
– Annotations
• Semantic Digital libraries enforce the transition from a
static information to a dynamic (collaborative) knowledge
space
The future - Social Semantic Digital Libraries

• Why current (semantic) digital libraries are not enough?

– digital libraries should not be for librarians only but for average
people
– they concentrate on delivering content/information, not on
knowledge sharing within a community of users
– digital libraries have lost human-part of their predecessors
• What could be the solution?
– make users/readers involved in the content annotation process
– allow users/readers to share their knowledge within a community
– provide better communication between users in and across
communities
The future - Social Semantic Digital Libraries

• What is Web 2.0?

– The Web where “ordinary” users can meet, collaborate, and
share using whatever is newly popular on the Web (tagged
content, social bookmarking, AJAX, etc.)
– The term Web 2.0 was made popular by Tim O’Reilly:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what
-is-web-20.html
– Popular examples include: Bebo, del.icio.us, digg, Flickr, Google
Maps, Skype, Technorati, Wikipedia…
The future - Social Semantic Digital Libraries

• Web 2.0 focuses include:

– The Web as a platform for social and collaborative exchange
– Reusable community contributions
– Subscriptions to information, news, data flows, services
– Mass-publishing using web-based social software
• Social software for communication and collaboration:
– IM, IRC, Forums, Blogs, Wikis, Social Network Services, Social
Bookmarks, MMOGs…
Social Semantic Information Spaces
Comparing Web 1.0 / Web 2.0 / Semantic Web 2.0

Web 1.0 Web 2.0 Semantic Web 2.0

Personal Websites Blogs Semantic Blogs

Content Management Wikis Semantic Wikis

Systems
Altavista, Google Google Personalised, Semantic Search
DumbFind
CiteSeer, Project Google Scholar, Book Social Semantic Digital
Gutenberg Search Libraries
Message Boards Community Portals Semantic Forums and
Community Portals
Buddy Lists, Address Online Social Networks Semantic Social Networks
Books
- - Semantic Social Information
Spaces
Evolution of Libraries

Social Semantic Digital Library

Involves the community into sharing knowledge

Semantic Digital Library

Accessible by machines, not only with machines

Digital Library
Online, easy searching with a full-text index

Library
Organized collection
Existing Semantic Digital Library Systems

• SIMILE
– extends and laverages DSpace, seeking to enhance
interoperability among digital assets, schemata, metadata,
and services
• JeromeDL
– a social semantic digital library makes use of Semantic Web
and Social Networking technologies to enhance both
interoperability and usability
• BRICKS
– aims at establishing the organizational and technological
foundations for a digital library network in order to share
knowledge and resources in the cultural heritage domain.
• FEDORA
– delivers flexible service-oriented architecture to managing
and delivering content in the form of digital objects
JeromeDL - Introduction

• Joint effort of DERI International and Gdansk University of

Technology (GUT)
• Distributed under BSD Open Source license
• Digital library build on semantic web technologies to
answer requirements from: librarians, scientists and
everyone.
• A successor for prototype semantic digital library – Elvis-
DL build at GUT
 JeromeDL – Motivations Use Cases

• Librarians:
– support for rich metadata (MARC21) in uploading resources,
accessing bibliographic information and searching
– persistent identifiers

• Scientists:
– easy publishing (designed as a institute/university digital library)
– creating hierarchical networks of digital libraries
– support for accessing, sharing and searching using bibliography
metadata (BibTeX)

• Everyone:
– simple search (incl. natural language queries)
– community-aware information sharing and browsing,
– support for interationalization
 JeromeDL - Motivations

• Support for different kinds of bibliographic medatata, like: DublinCore,

BibTeX and MARC21 at the same time.
– Making use of existing rich sources of bibliographic descriptions (like
MARC21) created by human.
• Supporting users and communities:
– users have control over their profile information;
– community-aware profiles are integrated with bibliographic descriptions
– support for community generated knowledge
• Delivering communication between instances:
– P2P mode for searching and users authentication
– Hierarchical mode for browsing
 Bibliographic Description in JeromeDL

01450cas 922004331i <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>

450000100...019c19329999gw <rdf:Description
qr|p| ||||0 |0ger | a0044-2992
9a200412140219bVLOADc200404071 rdf:about="http://...id=828374765">
525dvkulc200310071018dvbjc20030 <dc:title>JeromeDL - Adding Semantic Web
3101205dkopumky200209211341zVL Technologies to DLs</dc:title>
OAD aGD U/MPcGD
U/MPdGD U/MFdGD U/KKsdWR <dc:creator>Sebastian Kruk</dc:creator>
O/EJ0 ager1 aZ. Kunstgesch. <dc:description>In recent
0aZeitschrift für years...</dc:description>
These all can be represented in RDF
Kunstgeschichte00aZeitschrift für
Kunstgeschichte.18aZfK
</rdf:Description>
aMünchen ;aBerlin :bDeutscher
Kunstverlag,c1932-. c26-29 cm.
@InProceedings { jeromedexa2005,
aKwart.0 a1 Bd. (Juni 1932)-. author = "Sebastian Ryszard Kruk and ... ",
aOpis na podst.: LCC. aW 1932 title = "{JeromeDL - Adding Semantic ...}",
założycielami czasopisma byli
booktitle = "{In Proceedings to DEXA 2005}",
Wilhelm Waetzoldt i Ernst Gall....
year = 2005}
Structure ontology in JeromeDL

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Bibliographic (MarcOnt) Ontology in JeromeDL

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Community-aware (FOAFRealm) ontology

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Ontologies in JeromeDL
Metadata and Services in JeromeDL

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Social Services in JeromeDL

• Involve users into sharing knowledge

– Blogs – comments and discussions about documents and
resources
– Tagging – collaborative classification
– Wikis – collaboratively edited additional descriptions, such as
summaries and interesting facts
• Preserve knowledge for future use
– Users can learn from experience of others instantly
– Recommend new, interesting resources based on users’ profiles

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MarcOnt Initiative – Overview

Motivation:
• Provide set of tools for
collaborative ontology
development

MarcOnt Initiative goals:

• Create a framework for collaborative ontology improvement (E-learning)
• Provide domain experts with tools to share their knowledge
• Offer tools for data mediation between different data formats
 MarcOnt Portal and MarcOnt Ontology

MarcOnt Ontology:
Initial Ontology

 Central point of MarcOnt Initiative

Sugested Poposals
 Translation and mediation format
 Continuos collaborative ontology Versioning Proposal discussion

improvement
Proposal anotations
 Knowledge from the domain experts
Proposal autopromoting Proposal voting

MarcOnt Portal (source of knowledge):

Next Revision
• Suggestions MarcOnt Portal

• Annotations
• Versioning
• Ontology editor
 MarcOnt Mediation Services for Legacy Metadata

Format co-operation Format translation

MarcOnt Ontology
MarcOnt RDF

MARC21 RDF Dublin Core RDF New format RDF

MARC21 XML Dublin Core XML New format XML

MARC21 Dublin Core New format

MarcOnt Mediation Services RDF Translator

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FOAF - Describing Social Networks

• FOAF - Stands for Friend-of-a-Friend

• Defines properties for a person (but it does not have to be
a person, can be an “agent”)
• Does not only have to contain one person per file
• Can build a network of people with foaf:knows links
• FOAF can be easily extended to meet requirements, as in
the case of FOAFRealm for identity management…

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 Identity management with FOAFRealm

• Identity defined with extended FOAF

metadata
• Policies expressed by social networking
– Distance between owner and requester
– Friendship level between owner and requester,
calculated across digraph of social network

• Support for single registration and sign on

• Distributed identity management with
HyperCuP (“D-FOAF”)
• FOAFRealm is currently implemented as a plugin for Tomcat
(Realm/Valve implementation), with PHP and .NET versions
coming soon

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 What is Social Semantic Collaborative Filtering?

• Goal: to enhance individual bookmarks with shared knowledge

within a community
• Users annotate catalogues of bookmarks with semantic information
taken from DDC, DMoz, and WordNet vocabularies
• Catalogs can include (transclusion) friend's catalogues
• Access to catalogues can be restricted with social networking-based
polices
• SSCF delivers:
– Community-oriented, semantically-rich taxonomies
– Information about a user's interest
– Flows of expertise from the domain expert
– Recommendations based on users previous actions
– Support for SIOC metadata

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 Example of Social Semantic Collaborative Filtering

foaf:knows

xfoaf:include

xfoaf:bookmark

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 Social Networks in Digital Libraries

Resourc
marcont:hasCreator e
creator_A
xfoaf:isIn

xfoaf:Director xfoaf:Annotation
foaf:knows y

xfoaf:linksTo
xfoaf:owns

foaf:knows foaf:knows
creator_B user_D user_C
SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities)

• Framework/ontology for
connecting different online
community sites and
expressing information
collected from them
• Allows instant
import/export of the data
to the semantic character
for further use
• Still developed to cover
more Web 2.0 community
sites

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 Support for
online communities
in SSCF

53
 Support for
online communities
in SSCF

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 JeromeDL in Action

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Didaskon project

• Deliver a framework for assemblying an ondemand

curriculum from existing Learning Objects (LOs)
provided by e-Learning services
• Connection between formal and informal learning:
– Repository of couses prepared by specialists (formal LOs)
– Transform data collected from SSIS into LOs (informal
knowledge)
• Used ontologies link user needs and the
characteristics of the learning material

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Didaskon project

• LOs described with LOM ontology, composed into a learning path

for a specific student
• User profile (knowledge level in different domains and
goals/expectations from the course) described with FOAF ontology
– preconditions
• Didaskon:
– returns learning material customized for specific user’s needs
– allows more scalable helper features for students supervision
• Produced curriculum:
– reflects user requirements
– introduces new interdisciplinary, extensible and robust meaning of e-
Learning

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E-Learning Solution based on Social Sem. DL

• One of potential sources of future e-Learning systems

• On the verge between formal (libraries) and informal
(communities) learning sources
• Semantic interoperability with Learning Management
Systems
• Improve knowledge creation, delivery and sharing

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E-Learning Solution based on Social Sem. DL

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Evaluation of e-Learning Solution based on SSDL

• Comparison between process based on

JeromeDL and a set of other services
• Some tasks take shorter to execute with JeromeDL
• Some tasks are automated within JeromeDL
• Roughly twice less time spend with JeromeDL

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E-Learning Project at DERI Galway

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Between e-Learning and DL - Museum Scenario

• Museums have physical objects

• Should bind digital annotations with physical objects
• Real-virtual tours
– Start with real, guided tour
– Ubiquitous browse through context information
– Locate other exhibitions in the vicinity
– Share your knowledge and experience with others, leave bread-
crumbs for others
– Get the most of the exhibition during your visit

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Conclusions

• New generation of Internet services can bring digital

libraries:
– Closer to each other (interoperability)
– Closer to the users (online communities)
• Social and semantic services delivered in digital libraries
can enhance user experience in:
– E-Learning
– Real world (!) museums
– ... and other online and real services
• JeromeDL is the first digital library that aims to
implement these services
• Growing number of JeromeDL instances world-wide:
http://wiki.jeromedl.org/Instances

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 JeromeDL answers
various expectations

as the Digital Library on

Social Semantic Information Spaces

http://www.jeromedl.org/
http://wiki.jeromedl.org/

Sebastian Ryszard Kruk

DERI, NUI Galway, Ireland
sebastian.kruk@deri.org

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