Application of semantic technologies in bibliographic databases. A literature review and classification
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-03-2019-0081 |
| Date | 02 December 2019 |
| Published date | 02 December 2019 |
| Pages | 113-137 |
| Author | Tsvetanka Georgieva-Trifonova,Kaloyan Zdravkov,Donika Valcheva |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
Application of semantic
technologies in bibliographic
databases
A literature review and classification
Tsvetanka Georgieva-Trifonova,Kaloyan Zdravkov and
Donika Valcheva
Department of Mathematics and Informatics, University of Veliko Tarnovo,
Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to summarize the current state of the existing research on the
application of semantic technologies in bibliographic databases by providing answers to a set of research
questionsresulting from a systematic literature review.
Design/methodology/approach –The present study consists of conducting a systematic literature
review of research works related to the application of semantic technologies in bibliographic databases.
A manual keyword search is performed in known academic databases. As a result, a total of 78
literature sources are identified as related to the topic and included in the review. From the selected
literature sources, information is extracted, which is then summarized and analyzed according to
previously defined research questions and finally reported. Besides, a framework is defined to classify
literature sources found and collected as a result of the study. The main criteria, according to which the
classification is performed, are the used semantic technology and the research problem for which
semantic technologies are applied in bibliographic databases. The classification of the publications is
verified by each author independently of others.
Findings –The conducted systematic scientific review establishes that the evolution of semantic
technologies sets a period of increased interest in the researchers, as a result of which the advantages of
using them for bibliographic descriptions are examined and practically confirmed. After defining
semantic models for bibliographicdescriptions and approaches to transform existing bibli ographic data
into their correspondence, the research interest is directed at their comparison, collation; enrichment to
facilitate search and retrieval of useful information. Possible perspectives for future research are
outlined, which mainly relate to the complete use of the created data sets and their transformation into
knowledge repositories.
Originality/value –Despite the increasing importance of the semantic technologies in various areas,
including the bibliographic databases, there is a lack of comprehensive literature review and
classification of literature sources relevant to this topic. The detailed study proposed in the present
paper supports introducing with the existing experience in the application of semantic technologies in
bibliographic databases, as well as facilitates the discovery of trends and guidelines for future
research.
Keywords Bibliographic databases, Semantic technologies, Literature reviews
Paper type Literature review
The work presented in this paper was partially supported by the research project “Support the
preparation and publishing of the journal “Mathematics, Computer Science and Education”,“St. Cyril
and St. Methodius”University of Veliko Tarnovo, @FSD-31-340-09/26.03.2019.
Application of
semantic
technologies
113
Received26 March 2019
Revised15 July 2019
7September 2019
16October 2019
Accepted28 October 2019
TheElectronic Library
Vol.38 No. 1, 2020
pp. 113-137
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0264-0473
DOI 10.1108/EL-03-2019-0081
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0264-0473.htm
1. Introduction
The development of semantic technologies is associated with the realization of the idea for
the semantic web. The purposeof the semantic web is to make it possible for the information
available on the web to be processed by computers. Specifically, Web information can be
described in a way that allows computers to be used not only for visualization but also for
semantic interoperabilityand integration between systems and applications.
Resource description framework (RDF) is the W3C standard for creating descriptions of
information. It is also suitable for presenting metadata for Web resources. RDF schema
(RDFS) is an RDF extension that defines classes of resources, their properties, and
relationships. Since RDF and RDFS arebecoming increasingly popular among business and
scientific environments, more and more RDF content is being created,and there is a need to
standardize access to stored data. The language designed to allow RDF queries to be
executed is SPARQL protocoland RDF query language (recursively referred to as SPARQL).
Web ontology language (OWL) provides a language for defining structured web-based
ontologies and allows richer integration and semantic data interoperability between
communities and domains. One of the most important conceptsrelated to the semantic web
is so-called linked data. The goal is to publish structured data so that they can be easily
linked to each other and be made more useful. Semantic web rule language (SWRL) is an
OWL-based language that allows the compilation of rules that can be expressed in terms of
OWL concepts to provideOWL with more powerful deductive reasoning.
Recent detailed researchon the use of semantic technologies in various subject areas can
be found, such as historical studies (Meroño-Peñuela et al., 2015); pervasive computing (Ye
et al., 2015); robotics (Zander et al.,2016); Internet of things (Harlamova et al., 2017;Thoma
et al.,2014); analysis of socialnetworks (Bontcheva and Rout, 2014;Kulcu et al., 2016); online
analytical data processing (OLAP) (Abell
oet al., 2015); decision support (Blomqvist, 2014);
digital libraries (Hallo et al.,2015;Pandey and Panda, 2014); archives and museums (Zeng,
2019); and science and education(Keßler et al., 2013;Tiropanis et al.,2009).
In Mitchell (2016), the adoption of linked data and the application of linked data
technologies in libraries, archives and museums are discussed, and the current trends,
challenges and opportunities in this area are identified. Forthis purpose, a survey, covering
project teams, is conducted.In Solodovnik (2012), a review of the semantic technologies and
the opportunities they offerto present the metadata of bibliographic sources is made and the
existing experiencein their application is explored.
In the present study, the authors accept the definition of a bibliographic database given
in the International Encyclopedia of Information and Library Science (2003), namely, a
database with bibliographic records, an organized digital collection of references to
published literature, including articles in magazines and newspapers, conference papers,
reports, government and legal publications, patents, books, and more. The bibliographic
records describe articles,conference papers, monographs, and other publications rather than
complete texts, and usually contain rich descriptions in the form of keywords, terms for
classification of subjectareas, or abstracts.
There are bibliographic databases that play the role of digital libraries as they provide
the full text of the indexed content. The represented scientific literature review includes
papers that refer to digital libraries only if the problemsthey study affect the bibliographic
data.
According to the present research, there is a lack of a detailed review of the scientific
literature related to the application of semantic technologies in bibliographic databases.
This observation motivates the authors to provide a comprehensive review of the scientific
literature related to the applicationof semantic technologies in bibliographic databases. The
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