Publishing institutional repositories metadata on the semantic web

Abstract

Institutional repositories (IRs) are often built to serve a specific institution's community of users. Therefore, the information a researcher requires is often scattered in various repositories. For bridging the gap in scholarly communication, there is a need to publish research material on semantic web in a meaningful way. Semantic web applications enable sharing and reusing of existing information and create an integrated view of multidisciplinary information. However, IRs use relational database to store their metadata. It is essential to transform an IR database into ontology and publish its data on semantic web. The aim of this work is to share and reuse the information that exists in IRs. The proposed system extracts metadata from IRs, transforms it into ontology and publishes their data on semantic web. The system was implemented and compared with an existing system. The evaluation demonstrates that the proposed system produces more accurate results. © 2013 IEEE.