Guest editorial

Citation

Prasad, A.R.D. (2008), "Guest editorial", Online Information Review, Vol. 32 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/oir.2008.26432daa.001

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Online Information Review, Volume 32, Issue 4

The past decade has seen many developments in web technology; however, as the web evolved so fast and in an uncoordinated fashion, it makes one wonder whether it took off on the right lines.

HTML was designed more as a formatting language, meant to make the display of content visually attractive. Unfortunately, it gives little information about the content of the webpage. With the advent of XML, it became possible to incorporate information about the content in the form of metadata. This heralded enriched metadata sets that attempted to provide an indication of the “what” of web resources.

The earlier metadata schemas are based on descriptive metadata and are mostly meant for information objects that are bibliographic in nature, typically reflected in Dublin Core. There soon came a realisation that metadata could be extended to any entity, which need not be bibliographic. For example, there can be metadata of institutions, individuals, software, services and even products in the market. But again, this assumption has resulted in a plethora of metadata schemas, often with the same objective of describing the same digital object. This is expected in the earlier stages as many schemas tend to be widely adopted by various stakeholders with the hope of it becoming a standard.

This enthusiasm for developing and introducing new metadata schemas on the pretext that the approach of existing schemas is unsatisfactory may continue for some time, until the initial heat and dust settles and the best schema will prevail. It is however important that in evolving metadata schemas for varied entities, care should be taken to ensure interoperability.

In addition to the metadata, to satisfy the classic “subject” approach of users, we require ontologies. Ontologies help us to organise information on the web for providing various web-based information services. The semantic web has presented many tools like the resource description framework, web ontology language and even the simple knowledge organisation system. One of the major issues with ontologies is to evolve an ontology acceptable to all, even within a single domain. This is difficult because of the varied ways researchers perceive their domain. Hence, the advocacy for facetisation of ontologies.

Faceted ontologies, while systematically organising domain knowledge, provide the facility to envisage a given set of concepts in different contexts and relations, and so provide different subject views as required by the users.

However, the evolution and implementation of metadata schemas and ontologies alone will not suffice to provide web-based information services. Developments in the area of artificial intelligence like inference engines and mining techniques like data and text mining could be utilised to make semantic web technology more robust.

Thus, far, information on the web is meant for human consumption and the basic question is whether we can make the information machine consumable. If computers are provided with semantic knowledge of the information, it should be possible to generate highly customised and personalised information services. However, automatic text processing of information on the web is still a long way off; therefore the meaning has to be provided by humans in a structured format using metadata or an ontology.

Digital libraries, whether institutional repositories or discipline-based repositories, are seen as an outcome of the open access (OA) movement, which has been instrumental in the emergence of OA journals and other OA information. Open source software has provided excellent opportunities for publishing on the web. To ensure interoperability and long-term preservation, open standards are evolving in various facets, such as the format of web documents (JPEG, MPEG, etc.), metadata (Dublin Core), harvesting protocols (OAI-PMH) and even simple encoding standards like UNICODE. We at the Documentation Research and Training Centre of the Indian Statistical Institute term it “Open Mantra” with the motto: “Use open source software with open standards to establish OA repositories and journals in order to facilitate OA to information.”

The natural course of digital libraries is towards the semantic web. The content of digital repositories, whether books or articles or even e-learning modules, are to be related and presented to the machine to be interpreted. As the objects in a digital library do come with metadata and a kind of categorisation, digital libraries may offer a good starting point to experiment with semantic web technology. One can easily see the convergence of digital libraries and semantic web technology. The papers included in this issue aim to address some of the pertinent questions in the area of convergence.

Guest Editor

A.R.D. Prasad

Addendum

In the editorial entitled “The plague of plagiarism in an online world”, OIR, Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 297-301, there is a possible misinterpretation of my comments regarding Clarke. The intention is not to approve of Clarke’s precise statements, but rather to suggest that, whilst Clarke correctly reminds us to treat acts of plagiarism within the context of clear writing and varying cultural norms, plagiarism is never excusable in our context.

G.E. Gorman

Editor note

The Editor of OIR wishes to apologise to contributors for the long delay in reviewing and evaluating their submissions, due in part to an unexpectedly high number of quality submissions and in part to his extended illness in late 2007.

G.E. Gorman