Emerging Approaches to Subject Information Terry Willan Talis CIG Conference University of Strathclyde 4 th September 2008

Overview A subjective survey Subject-based discovery in library catalogues –Search –Navigation –Social discovery –Browse Knowledge organisation the semantic way Musings on what it all means for libraries

Keyword search Traditional approach – field options Moving to the single box

Relevance Ranking I expect the system to give me the resources that meet my need immediately

Understanding the Query Reading the user’s mind Start inclusively Query manipulation Did you mean … Refine

Query Manipulation Saint/St Augustine Doctor/Dr Who cactus/cacti aid/aids Blairs britain Stratford upon avon Feet/foot Economic/economical/ economy/economies/ economist …

Spelling suggestions Notes without muzic: an autobiography / Darius Milhaud Data / User behaviour Large scale

Structured Controlled Data Libraries lack massive scale… …but have structured controlled data … …such as authority data

Facets

Related search

Social Discovery User contributed content Adds value for others Participation, not passive consumption Network effects – crowd-sourcing negligible cost to libraries Controlled vocabulary vs folksonomy Scale brings quality.

Pause for Thought What about scholarship & research? “On the Record” but Off the Track A Review of the Report of The Library of Congress Working Group on The Future of Bibliographic Control, With a Further Examination of Library of Congress Cataloging Tendencies Thomas Mann

Browse

Semantic Web

What is it? Web of documents Web of data

Potential benefits Richer, easier discovery experience … … as more data becomes connected And when good tools are developed to exploit it

How does it work? RDF triples: subject – predicate - object Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) Vocabularies defined in standard language Expose data on the web, with links to other data No central control

4 Principles of Linked Data 1. Use URIs to identify things 2. Use http URIs so people can look things up 3. Provide useful data in RDF (preferably reusing ontologies) 4. Use RDF to link to other things

The Linking Open Data dataset cloud

Conclusion Opportunity for libraries Good at managing the semantics Put the data out there & link it Paradox: give to receive Hubs in the web of data Focus on the data – let others exploit it?

Emerging Approaches to Subject Information Terry Willan Talis CIG Conference University of Strathclyde 4 th September 2008 Thank You Questions