A scholarly semantic web system for advanced search functions
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520710764113 |
| Published date | 26 June 2007 |
| Pages | 353-364 |
| Date | 26 June 2007 |
| Author | Q.T. Tho,A.C.M. Fong,S.C. Hui |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
A scholarly semantic web system
for advanced search functions
Q.T. Tho, A.C.M. Fong and S.C. Hui
School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Abstract
Purpose – The semantic web gives meaning to information so that humans and computers can work
together better. Ontology is used to represent knowledge on the semantic web. Web services have been
introduced to make the knowledge conveyed by the ontology on the semantic web accessible across
different applications. This paper seeks to present the use of these latest advances in the context of a
scholarly semantic web (or SSWeb) system, which can support advanced search functions such as
expert finding and trend detection in addition to basic functions such as document and author search
as well as document and author clustering search.
Design/methodology/approach – A distributed architecture of the proposed SSWeb is described,
as well as semantic web services that support scholarly information retrieval on the SSWeb.
Findings – Initial experimental results indicate that the proposed method is effective.
Research limitations/implications – The work reported is experimental in nature. More work is
needed, but early results are encouraging and the authors wish to make their work known to the
research community by publishing this paper so that further progress can be made in this area of
research.
Originality/value – The work is presented in the context of scholarly document retrieval, but it
could also be adapted to other types of documents, such as medical records, machine-fault records and
legal documents. This is because the basic principles are the same.
Keywords Worldwide web,Information retrieval, Search engines, Knowledge transfer
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Currently, information available on the web has been designed for human
understanding. Programs can be written to process, analyse and index web pages to
help humans to process the information. However, due to the lack of machine-readabl e
structure and knowledge representation in web documents, programs are unable to
comprehend web page contents precisely and hence semantic information from web
documents cannot be extracted. Thus, a method is needed for representing knowledge
in such a way that programs can understand, share and exchange the knowledge.
The Semantic Web (Berners-Lee et al., 2001) has been proposed as an extension of
the current web, in which information is given well-defined meaning to better en able
computers and people to work together. Ontology (Sim and Wong, 2004) is used to
represent knowledge on the Semantic Web. Generally, ontology is a conceptualisation
of a domain into a machine-readable format that is also comprehensible by humans,
consisting of entities, attributes, relationships and axioms (Guarino and Giaretta,
1995). Thus, programs can use the knowledge from the Semantic Web for processing
information semantically. Web Services (Austin et al., 2002; Hu et al., 2003) have been
introduced to make the knowledge conveyed by the ontology on the Semantic Web
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
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A scholarly
semantic web
system
353
Refereed article received
1 July 2006
Approved for publication
29 October 2006
Online Information Review
Vol. 31 No. 3, 2007
pp. 353-364
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/14684520710764113
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