Organisational challenges of the semantic web in digital libraries: a Norwegian case study
| Date | 25 September 2009 |
| Pages | 973-985 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520911001945 |
| Published date | 25 September 2009 |
| Author | Bendik Bygstad,Gheorghita Ghinea,Geir‐Tore Klæboe |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Organisational challenges of the
semantic web in digital libraries:
a Norwegian case study
Bendik Bygstad
Norwegian School of Information Technology, Oslo, Norway
Gheorghita Ghinea
School of Information Systems and Computing, Brunel University,
London, UK, and
Geir-Tore Klæboe
G2 Consulting, Mo I Rana, Norway
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine from a socio-technical point of view the impact of
semantic web technology on the strategic, organisational and technological levels. The semantic web
initiative holds great promise for the future for digital libraries. There is, however, a considerable gap
in semantic web research between the contributions in the technological field and research in the
organisational field.
Design/methodology/approach – A comprehensive case study of the National Library of Norway
(NL) is conducted, building on two major sources of information: the documentation of the digitising
project of the NL; and interviews with nine different stakeholders at three levels of NL’s organisation
during June to August 2007. Top managers are interviewed on strategy, middle managers and
librarians are interviewed regarding organisational issues and ICT professionals are interviewed on
technology issues.
Findings – The findings indicate that the highest impact will be at the organisational level. This is
mainly because inter-organisational and cross-organisational structures have to be established to
address the problems of ontology engineering, and a development framework for ontology engineering
in digital libraries must be examined.
Originality/value – ICT professionals and library practitioners should be more mindful of
organisational issues when planning and executing semantic web projects in digital libraries. In
particular, practitioners should be aware that the ontology engineering process and the semantic
meta-data production will affect the entire organisation. For public digital libraries this probably will
also call for a more open policy towards user groups to properly manage the process of ontology
engineering.
Keywords Semantics, Digitallibraries, Organizations,Norway
Paper type Case study
Introduction
For organisations with large amounts of non-numerical data the semantic web
initiative holds promise for the future (Berners-Lee et al., 2001). The past decade gave
us not only the semantic web and eXtensible Markup Language (XML), but also such
tools as the resource description framework (RDF) and ontology languages (Warren
and Alsmeyer, 2005). Together these concepts and tools provide us with a powerful
environment to escape the lexical doldrums of the World Wide Web.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
Semantic web in
digital libraries
973
Refereed article received
25 November 2008
Approved for publication
22 May 2009
Online Information Review
Vol. 33 No. 5, 2009
pp. 973-985
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/14684520911001945
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