Search results

To describe a browsing and searching personalization system for digital libraries based on the use of ontologies for describing the relationships between all the elements which take part in a digital library scenario of use.

Identification of all the desired functionalities and requirements that are necessary to fully integrate the use of a digital library in an e‐learning environment, and the basic elements that are used to build the ontology that describes such scenario.

The elements that determine the functionalities of the desired personalization system: first, the user's profile, including navigational history and user preferences; and second, the information collected from the navigational behavior of the digital library users.

The ontology is not complete. In fact, the ontology in itself will evolve with the new apparition of desired functionalities and requirements of the personalization system.

Such a personalization system will be very helpful to the users of a digital library to improve their experience of use.

The use of ontologies promotes the integration of new services into existing ones, and the interoperability with other systems through the appropriate semantic web services. New system functionalities and requirements can be added by including the appropriate description into the ontology framework that defines the digital library scenario of use.

The aim of this paper is to introduce the special issue on the Semantic Web. Intensive research has been undertaken worldwide in research centres and several achievements have been accomplished towards the ultimate objective: the expression and the exploitation of humanity's collective knowledge.

A multi‐fold strategy for the preparation of this special issue was deployed. Given the special characteristics, a balanced mix of introductory papers to the topic, and also advanced research papers at the leading edge of Semantic Web evolution, were selected.

The paper summarizes the articles of the issue and also provides help in understanding the Semantic Web Roadmap of Digital Libraries.

Introduces the papers in the special issue.