The Outreach of Digital Libraries: A Globalized Resource Network

Abstract

Subjects are grouped in a classification system according to their established natural relationship. Subject-based searching (SS) in institutional repositories (IR) searches objects on the basis of subjects. The existing SS technique in the IR system: DSpace, partially exploits the semantics inherent in subject-based classification and misses out objects that are relevant to a user query. Ontology describes the semantic relationships that exist among different subjects of classification. Our proposed system employs ontology for SS in order to exploit the semantic relationships that exist among subjects. We figure out the family of a user given subject, assign different weights to semantic relationships and rank the retrieved objects according to weights. The proposed system was compared with the existing DSpace SS system. The results shows that the system returns more relevant objects than the existing SS system. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.