A cooperative environment for the negotiation of term taxonomies in digital libraries
| Pages | 271-280 |
| Published date | 01 May 2005 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/01435120510596116 |
| Date | 01 May 2005 |
| Author | Francesco Bellomi,Matteo Cristani,Roberta Cuel |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science |
A cooperative environment for
the negotiation of term
taxonomies in digital libraries
Francesco Bellomi, Matteo Cristani and Roberta Cuel
Dipartimento di Informatica, Universita
`di Verona, Verona, Italy
Abstract
Purpose – Several systems for the management of digital libraries have evolved in the recent past
from simple document repository to sophisticated applications that provide the possibility of
classifying and, in some cases, even rating the documents collected in the library itself. In a few of
those systems members of the community of practice that uses and produces the library itself can also
be active in assigning a reputation score to each other. This study aimed to explore the idea of using a
collectively negotiated term taxonomy in order to develop a better model for the automated evaluation
of users’ competence on different discussion topics.
Design/methodology/approach – The study provides a formalization of the approach we propose,
and the proposal of an architecture for implementing a system deploying the approach.
Findings – The study analyses the issues related to the implementation of a digital library, and
develops an architecture that aims to evaluate users’ competence about different discussion topics in
an automated way.
Research limitations/implications – The paper only describes an abstract architecture of a
self-balancing digital library. Further research should investigate the different possible choices for the
implementation details that have been left out from this first explorative analysis.
Originality/value – The novelty of the approach resides in the fact that we make use of a
collectively negotiated taxonomy in order to automatically assign relevance scores to reviewers’
evaluations.
Keywords Digital libraries,Knowledge management
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Complex and networked organizations, structured into many, heterogeneous unities
both internal or external and both formally (e.g., departments, divisions, national
branches) and informally (e.g., communities, interest groups) need to cooperate and
coordinate their work according to a more complex and dynamic value chain; to share
knowledge both within the firm and across his network. In a lot of articles most KM
projects share the goal of creating large and homogeneous knowledge-based systems
(KBSs), in which corporate knowledge is made explicit, codified, organized according
to a single and coherent schema, and then made available through an Enterprise
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The authors gratefully thank ACP s.r.l. for funding. This work has taken place within the
projects DAVA “Tecniche di Decisione Automatica con criteri multipli e Valutazioni Arbitrarie”
(“Techniques of automated decision with multiple criteria and arbitrary evaluation”), and DAVA
2. The authors also thank Creactive Consulting for funding. The work of the second and third
authors have also taken place in a synergic effort with DAVA cooperator. The project name is
“OASI (Ontologie degli Artefatti e dei Servizi alle imprese” – “Ontologies for the representation
of artifacts and services in industrial applications”) and OASI 2
Negotiation of
term taxonomies
271
Library Management
Vol. 26 No. 4/5, 2005
pp. 271-280
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0143-5124
DOI 10.1108/01435120510596116
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