Semantic Web enabled digital repositories

Abstract

Digital repositories and digital libraries are today among the most common tools for managing and disseminating digital object collections of cultural, educational, and other kinds of content over the Web. However, it is often the case that descriptive information about these assets, known as metadata, are usually semi-structured from a semantics point of view; implicit knowledge about this content may exist that cannot always be represented in metadata implementations and thus is not always discoverable. To this end, in this article we propose a method and a practical implementation that could allow traditional metadata-intensive repositories to benefit from Semantic Web ideas and techniques. In particular, we show how, starting with a semi-structured knowledge model (like the one offered by DSpace), we can end up with inference-based knowledge discovery, retrieval, and navigation among the repository contents. Our methodology and results are applied on the University of Patras institutional repository. The resulting prototype is also available as a plug-in, although it can fit, in principle, any other kind of digital repository.