E-Librarian Service - User-Friendly Semantic Search in Digital Libraries

This book introduces a new approach in designing E-Librarian Services. Such a system is able to retrieve multimedia resources from a digital library in a more efficient way than by browsing through an index, or by using a simple keyword search. It combines recent advances in multimedia information retrieval with aspects of human-machine interfaces. The user can enter his question in natural language. The premise is that more pertinent results would be retrieved if the search engine understood the sense of the user's query. The returned results are then logical consequences of an inference rather than of keyword matchings. An E-Librarian Service simulates a human librarian. Hence, it does not return the answer to the user's question, but it retrieves the most pertinent document(s), in which the user finds the answer to his question. Also, an E-Librarian Service always proposes a solution to the user, even if the system concludes that there is no exhaustive answer.

List of contents

Part I: Information Retrieval in Digital Libraries.- Introduction to Digital Libraries.- Search Engines.- Part II: Key Technologies of E-Librarian Services.- Semantic Web and Ontologies.- Description Logics and Reasoning.- Natural Language Processing.- Multimedia Information Retrieval.- Part III: Design and Utilization of E-Librarian Services.- Ontological Approach.- Design of the Natural Language Processing Module.- Designing the Multimedia Information Retrieval Module.- Implementation, Configuration, and Deployment.- Best Practices.- Part IV: Appendix.- A - XML SChema Primitive Datatypes.- B - Reasoning Algorithms.- C - Syntactic Difference.- D - Brown Tag Set.- E - Part-of-Speech-Taggers and Parsers.- References.

About the author

Dr. sc. nat. Christoph Meinel (1954) ist Direktor und Geschäftsführer des Hasso-Plattner-Instituts für Softwaresystemtechnik GmbH (HPI) und ordentlicher Professor (C4) für Internet-Technologien und Systeme. Er hat Mathematik und Informatik an der Humboldt-Universität in Berlin studiert, dort 1981 promoviert und sich 1988 an der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin habilitiert. Er wurde 1992 zum ordentlichen Professor (C4) für Informatik an die Univ. Trier berufen und hat dort in den Jahren 1998-2002 neben seinem Lehrstuhl das von der Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft betreute Institut für Telematik e.V. geleitet. Seit 2004 ist er Direktor und Geschäftsführer des HPIs und hat einen Lehrstuhl (C4) für Internet-Technologien und Systeme an der Universität Potsdam. Neben seiner Lehrtätigkeit in Potsdam ist er Gastprofessor an der Univ. Luxembourg (Luxembourg) und an der TU Peking (China) und als Programmdirektor des HPI-Stanford Forschungsprogramms zum Design Thinking Research tätig. Christoph Meinel ist Autor bzw. Co-Autor und Inhaber internationaler Patente. Seine aktuellen Forschungsinteressen liegen in den Bereichen IT-Sicherheit, Teleteaching, Semantic/Social Web und e-Health. Er war wissenschaftlich aktiv auch auf dem Gebiet der Komplexitätstheorie und hat (BDD-basierte) Datenstrukturen und effiziente Algorithmen untersucht und entworfen. Er ist Chairman des 2007 gegründeten deutschen IPv6-Rats, Herausgeber von ECCC - Electronic Colloquiums on Computational Complexity, des IT-Gipfelblog und des tele-TASK-Archivs. 1996-2007 gehörte er dem Direktorium des IBFI Schloss Dagstuhl an und war Sprecher der GI-Fachgruppe 'Komplexität'. Er hat in einer großen Zahl internationaler Programm-Komitees mitgewirkt, diverse Konferenzen und Symposien veranstaltet und ist in wissenschaftlichen Aufsichtsräten aktiv.

Summary

This book introduces a new approach to designing E-Librarian Services. With the help of this system, users will be able to retrieve multimedia resources from digital libraries more efficiently than they would by browsing through an index or by using a simple keyword search. E-Librarian Services combine recent advances in multimedia information retrieval with aspects of human-machine interfaces, such as the ability to ask questions in natural language; they simulate a human librarian by finding and delivering the most relevant documents that offer users potential answers to their queries. The premise is that more pertinent results can be retrieved if the search engine understands the meaning of the query; the returned results are therefore logical consequences of an inference rather than of keyword matches. Moreover, E-Librarian Services always provide users with a solution, even in situations where they are unable to offer a comprehensive answer.

Additional text

From the reviews:
“The subtitle gives a much better idea of what this book is really about. … it offers a demonstration of their applicability within a narrow computer science framework. … the primary audience is computer science researchers. … It is interesting as an illustration of where information retrieval is heading, an explanation of the relationship between the semantic web and natural language processing, and a glimpse of the potential power of these new ways of representing knowledge.” (Toby Burrows, Australian Library Journal, Vol. 61 (2), May, 2012)

Report

From the reviews:
"The subtitle gives a much better idea of what this book is really about. ... it offers a demonstration of their applicability within a narrow computer science framework. ... the primary audience is computer science researchers. ... It is interesting as an illustration of where information retrieval is heading, an explanation of the relationship between the semantic web and natural language processing, and a glimpse of the potential power of these new ways of representing knowledge." (Toby Burrows, Australian Library Journal, Vol. 61 (2), May, 2012)

Product details

• Authors: Serg Linckels, Serge Linckels, Christoph Meinel
• Publisher: Springer, Berlin
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 11.05.2011
• EAN: 9783642177422
• ISBN: 978-3-642-17742-2
• No. of pages: 212
• Dimensions: 155 mm x 239 mm x 19 mm
• Weight: 472 g
• Illustrations: XVI, 212 p.
• Series: X.media.press / publishing; X.media.publishing; X.media.press / publishing; x.media.publishing
• Subject: Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > IT, data processing > IT