A New Viewpoint to the Architecture of Digital Libraries: Ontological Applications in Semantic Digital Libraries

Digital library is an integrated set of electronic resources and services for capturing, organizing, protecting and retrieving information in digital formats. Nowadays, the emergence of semantic web and ontology, support the evolution of digital libraries and creating semantic digital libraries. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to survey into the applications of ontology in digital libraries. Ontology is a highly expressive representation of objects, classes of objects and relations between them in a particular domain. Ontology has some potential benefits such as inferencing capability, interoperability, natural language processing (NLP) support and search query understanding. Therefore it can be used to convert digital libraries to distributed and intelligent information systems and to create semantic digital libraries. Creating different capabilities in digital libraries architecture, specially inference capability, transmission of information between digital libraries and other information systems, semantic description of resources in digital libraries with mapping MARC bibliographic metadata in an ontology (such as MarcOnt ontology), improvement the question-answering system of digital libraries (such as BT Digital Library), creating a user-friendly interface and making available an easy and quick search and browsing, are some of ontology applications in digital libraries that surveyed.