Emerging Approaches to Subject Information

Terry Willan Talis

terry.willan@talis.com

CIG ConferenceUniversity of Strathclyde4th 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 ManipulationSaint/St Augustine Doctor/Dr Who

cactus/cacti aid/aids

Blairs britain

Stratford upon avon

Feet/foot

Economic/economical/economy/economies/economist …

Spelling suggestionsNotes 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 http://www.guild2910.org/WorkingGrpResponse2008.pdf

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

http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/

http://libris.kb.se/data/auth/154863?format=application/rdf%2bxml

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

terry.willan@talis.com

CIG ConferenceUniversity of Strathclyde4th September 2008

Thank You

Questions